44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 27, 2024 10:00AM
- Feb/27/24 10:27:46 a.m.
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The NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption. After eight years, his inflationary taxes and deficits have doubled the national debt, have driven inflation to 40-year highs and have driven two million people to food banks, a record-smashing number. After eight years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, work does not pay. People make it, and he takes it.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled, mortgage payments have doubled, rent has doubled and down payments needed for an average home have doubled. After eight years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, we have crime, chaos, drugs and disorder. He is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
Nothing could be more emblematic of this waste than the arrive scam app, an app that was supposed to cost $80,000 but went up to at least $60 million. What did the NDP do when it found out that the Prime Minister needed more money for his app? It voted for that money. Even though it knew full well that the app was supposed to cost $80,000, it voted for at least $24 million additional dollars for an app that did not work. About 76% of the contractors did no actual work. The prime contractor got IT contracts even though it does no IT work, and it is headquartered in the basement of a cottage. That is part of a $21-billion boom in outsourcing by the government, a 100% increase in external consultants that costs $1,400 for every single Canadian family, which are federal taxes for consultants: $1,400.
Today, we call for all the details on arrive scam to be released. The Auditor General says she does not know how much was spent. It was at least $60 million. That is why we want the government to be obliged by the House to release all the documents, all the costs and to tell the truth. We want to know everybody who got rich through this corruption and how much Canadians actually had to pay for.
We are going to get rid of that app. We are going to cut back on outside consultants. We are going to cap spending, cut waste, and balance the budget to bring down inflation and interest rates, because our common-sense priorities are to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
It is common sense. Let us bring it home.
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- Feb/27/24 11:47:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise, and I will be sharing my time with the member for Courtenay—Alberni.
The question of how public money is spent or misspent is a fundamental question of an obligation for parliamentarians, because the Canadian people do not need to pay attention to everything that happens in Parliament. However, they need to know that there is accountability and that we respect their hard-working money being spent properly and through the right channels.
I have many years of experience in the House dealing with all the smut and corruption files that have come along. I was elected in my first year as the Liberal government was telling us that Jean Chrétien's golf balls were going to keep the country together. Fortunately, the Canadian people did not believe that. That was the first scandal I witnessed. I have lost track of all the scandals.
We can take misspending and put it into various categories. There are simply the tawdry ones, like with Bev Oda, who seemed to rack up as many bills as possible every time she travelled until people finally became fed up. There was the issue with Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright, where Mike Duffy was claiming all kinds of outrageous claims because he was a bagman and raised money for the Conservatives. We were presented with this bizarre case that it was okay to offer a secret bribe, but it was a problem to receive the bribe.
Those scandals did not just belong to the Conservatives. There was Mac Harb, a Liberal, who had this amazing grifter scheme. He was not eligible for travel, so he bought this dodgy little broken down cottage just 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa because if he lived 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa, he could hit up the taxpayer for all kinds of travel, even though, I was told, there was not even running water at that cottage. Mac Harb had to pay back $231,000.
People deserve to be outraged by that abuse, and it raised questions in the Senate of where the accountability is to make sure that the people who are there are doing their jobs. I remember Tony Clement and the $50 million that was taken out of border funds so that he could buy sunken boats and build a fake lake in Muskoka. That was an abusive process. It was not criminal; it was an abusive process.
There was the issue with Arthur Porter, which was one of the more concerning scandals I have witnessed over the years. Stephen Harper appointed him as head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and made him a privy councillor. We then, of course, found out he was involved in what CBC said was “the biggest fraud investigation in Canadian history”, and he ended up dying in Panama in a jail.
Those are elements of criminality, “griftership”, tawdriness and of people just misusing the public funds.
The ArriveCAN thing needs to be put in perspective of the time, and then analyze it from there. When we were hit with the pandemic, we were dealing with a completely unknown crisis that none of us had faced, and there was certainly a need to get a response out the door quickly.
Who did the best job at that? It was our public servants. They basically spent that Easter weekend in 2020 creating a program to get the CERB dollars out to people who were not able to work and to keep them going. It was the Public Service who did good, amazing work during that time.
However, there were a number of scandals that came up during that period, and ArriveCAN fits into that because it is a question of the lack of oversight and accountability. Certainly, Canadians deserve to know how a contract worth $59.5 million, divided up through 32 companies, for a program that did not work was allowed to go ahead. We ask ourselves how that was possible.
I would like to share with my colleagues some of the recommendations that came out of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which looked into some of the other elements. We looked at Baylis Medical, at Palantir and at the Kielberger brothers. At the time, again, the government wanted to get a youth program out. There was $500 million to $940 million set aside for the Kielberger operation without competition and without very clear oversight. What the committee found was that the incredible access Marc and Craig Kielberger had into the inner workings of government gave them an advantage no one else had.
I would encourage any of my colleagues to read the Ethics Commissioner report on the former finance minister, Bill Morneau. It makes for a pretty shocking reading that these guys had an all-access pass into the corridors of the Liberal government and were not even registered to lobby. That certainly was a major factor in bringing down Mr. Morneau.
I want to raise this because if we have these scandals, we need to learn from them. We need to learn how money was misspent. We need to learn why there was no oversight, so that this is not repeated. Otherwise we become a laughingstock of repetition of failure from insiders, from misuse of public funds and from contracting out.
With respect to the contracting out that was to be done with the WE group, I am going to read what the all-party committee said. This is not my opinion but that of all of the political parties that participated. It reported this back to Parliament:
The Committee was unable to find any due diligence reports that actually tested the credibility of the claims made by the WE Charity. This group had never undertaken a project close to this magnitude and it remains unclear whether they had the means to ensure that students across the country could be put to work with credible results.
It was going to be given $500 million initially, and there were no due diligence reports that we could find anywhere. Then we found out that the money was going to be funnelled to a shell company initially set up to deal with some of its incredible real estate holdings. How is it possible that the Government of Canada would transfer between $500 million and $940 million to a shell company? Who was taking the enormous risk then? It was the Canadian people. I am going to read from the all-party committee report again:
The Committee is of the view that the decision of the Liberal government of Canada to sign a contract worth over $500 million with a shell company “WE Charity Foundation” is deeply troubling. The WE group stated they used the shell company to limit their liability. In reality, this procedure had the potential to put a huge investment of taxpayers funds at risk because the deal was with a shell company with no assets.
How does a G7 country sign on to something that concerning?
I am raising this because of the whole thing about ArriveCAN and the Auditor General's not being able to find anything on how the money was spent. One of the most disturbing factors is that after 10 months of study, we had to report to Parliament that we had no idea how the finances of the supposed children's charity worked. We could not tell the Canadian people who controlled its multitude of corporations. We did not even know all the companies that it controlled. We could not tell the difference between its so-called charity work and its for-profit work, or tell what its ownership structure was, yet the government, without doing due diligence, was going to sign over between $500 million and $940 million.
The report states:
The Committee notes that over the 10 months of its study, it was unable to get a clear picture of the financial structure of the WE group. We were unable to ascertain a clear division between how monies flowed through the charitable wing and their for-profit operations. We were also denied information on the ownership structure of their multitude of side companies. If the government of Canada is to sign future contracts or contribution agreements with WE Charity, its affiliates or subsidiaries, such clarifications must be required.
I raise that because we are looking at a very similar thing that happened with ArriveCAN. Where was the oversight?
This is the other question I am going to end on. We spent 10 months trying to get the CFO of WE to testify, just to tell us what was happening. We were told not only that he was on medical leave but also that he had a brain aneurism that, if we asked him questions, might cause his death. Certainly nobody in Parliament was going to wish that someone die under the pressure, but the WE group could not come up with anybody else who could explain its very complex financial structure.
On May 15, 2021, we received a letter from Mr. Li saying that he was too sick, had not been doing any work and was completely uninvolved, yet we found that in that period, in the state of California, there was a registration renewal in November 2020 on which he signed off as CFO. There was a New York state filing on which he signed off as CFO, an Internal Revenue Service report in 2020 and a Washington State report. All of these were signed off on by Victor Li, yet our committee was told that he was so fragile and sick that he could not even read documents. We were not in a position to do a criminal investigation, but we had to report back to Parliament that there had been a major failure of fundamental accountability.
Has the government learned lessons from what happened with the WE brothers, or do we have to repeat these tawdry, dumbed-down abuses of public funds because the accountability mechanisms that should have been there were ignored and the Canadian taxpayer is on the hook? I will be here all week.
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- Feb/27/24 1:35:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is incredibly disappointing that the Bloc took the opportunity more than a half-dozen times to vote to increase the funding to this scandal-plagued arrive scam app. It is so frustrating for Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet.
When the Conservatives were in government, there was no $60 million arrive scam. Spending on outside consultants was less than half of what it has ballooned to, at more than $21 billion under the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, who is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
As I said, it was not like that before these Liberals and it will not be like that after them.
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- Feb/27/24 2:14:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. After eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, corruption, cover-ups or crime.
Only the Prime Minister can turn an $80,000 app budget into a $60-million boondoggle. When tasked with holding the government to account, the NDP voted not once, not twice and not three times to keep funding arrive scam; it was eight times that the NDP voted to give tens of millions of tax dollars to two guys in a basement for money-for-nothing contracts.
Common-sense Conservatives voted no. Had the NDP and Bloc done the same, arrive scam funding would never have happened. Conservatives know how hard Canadians work for their money, and we will not award contracts to Liberal insiders so they can hold whisky tastings and private dinners with government officials.
After eight years, it is time to fix what the Liberal-NDP coalition has broken. It is time for a common-sense Conservative government.
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- Feb/27/24 2:19:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, crime or corruption. Only common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Canadians deserve answers about how the Liberal government's useless arrive scam app went from costing $80,000 to at least $60 million. Just last week, the national president of the CBSA's union said that the $60 million that was squandered on the arrive scam app could have been used to hire 600 frontline border agents.
This Liberal-NDP coalition is not worth the cost. We now know that this reckless abuse of taxpayer money and blatant corruption is just the tip of the iceberg. Four years of emails have vanished in an apparent attempt to cover up the corruption and destroy records related to this scam app. The NDP voted “yes” at least eight times to give tens of millions of dollars for cost overruns and money-for-nothing contracts to shell companies. Common-sense Conservatives voted “no” every time.
The NDP now has the chance to stand up and vote to release all the missing documents.
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- Feb/27/24 2:49:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. After eight years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, he is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
Today, the commissioner of the RCMP confirmed that the Liberals' scandal-plagued $60-million arrive scam app is, in fact, under RCMP investigation. We have seen the Prime Minister use the powers of the executive to try to shield himself from criminal investigations, just as he did with his trip to the Aga Khan's island and the SNC-Lavalin scandal, for both of which he was found guilty of breaking the ethics act.
Will the Prime Minister fully co-operate with the RCMP investigation?
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- Feb/27/24 2:51:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is breaking news today from the ethics committee. The RCMP have now confirmed that they are investigating the $60-million ArriveCAN boondoggle. While common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, crime or corruption after eight years.
Will the Prime Minister co-operate with the RCMP and its criminal investigation, or will he yet again try to obstruct?
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- Feb/27/24 3:05:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption. The government spent a minimum of $60 million on arrive scam. It could even be more. We do not know because there is missing documentation. IT middlemen at GC Strategies got $20 million for doing no actual work. The top cop in the RCMP announced today a full investigation into arrive scam.
Today, the Prime Minister has a decision to make: Will he co-operate with the RCMP, or will he obstruct justice, as he usually does?
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- Feb/27/24 3:08:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, those who misuse taxpayers' money will face the consequences in the next election. While common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption after eight years. We heard ministers telling us today that RCMP criminal investigation into corruption in their government has become so commonplace, after eight years, it is not really news anymore. I am old enough to remember a time when it was a big deal that the RCMP investigated the government. It has been too many times, and it is time the government be held to account.
Finally, will the minister tell us whether the government will co-operate with the RCMP investigation?
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- Feb/27/24 3:10:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us make a contrast. While common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, the Prime Minister is tripping over his feet trying to save his reputation by covering up yet another scandal. He is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
Will the Prime Minister release all the Winnipeg lab documents today, or will the shame and embarrassment be too much to endure?
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- Feb/27/24 4:11:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will start with a caveat. I have been involved in so many committees looking at this particular scam that it will be a real challenge to keep my comments to 10 minutes. I could literally speak for hours, but I am happy to highlight some of the important points today.
I will start by reiterating our common-sense plan. As Conservatives, we will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. After eight years, with a worn-out, tired Liberal-NDP government, Canadians have endured unprecedented levels of corruption.
Today, we are debating the Conservative motion that calls on the Liberal government to table the full cost of the arrive scam app within 100 days from today's date and to reclaim all money that was paid to contractors and subcontractors who performed no work. This is the app, according to the Prime Minister, that should have cost the taxpayer $80,000, but now we have the Auditor General guessing at an amount of $60 million. It could be $70 million or $80 million. We do not know how much more than $60 million, but we do know that it is at least 750 times more than the original cost.
I have been keeping track for several weeks now; several ministers, if not members of the backbench, have commented that, if the rules were broken and there was malfeasance or criminality, those responsible will be held accountable for their actions. What we have not heard at all is any minister, including the Prime Minister, indicating in the House that the buck stops with the government. Where was the Prime Minister? Where was the Minister of Public Services and Procurement?
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- Feb/27/24 4:14:25 p.m.
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Where were all those ministers for a period of three-plus years? Were they completely tone deaf? Were they completely derelict in their responsibility, asleep at the wheel? Were they simply complicit with fleecing the Canadian taxpayer of at least $60 million?
Why is that important? It is because they need to look themselves in the mirror and say to Canadians that they did not provide the appropriate ministerial oversight.
I have heard from deputy ministers and from several presidents of the impugned agencies, as laid out in the Auditor General's report. Every one of them confirmed regular, consistent, numerous discussions with the appropriate minister.
Surely, all of them, including the Prime Minister, knew how badly out of control this arrive scam was going. They had the opportunity to rein in this out-of-control spending and stop the criminality, but they did not.
That is what Canadians should be most appalled about, not necessarily just our professional public servants and those individuals they contracted with, such as GC Strategies. They are under investigation. Quite frankly, the government and the Prime Minister need to be under investigation.
We all know what is going to happen; we knew about it in the Aga Khan scandal and the SNC-Lavalin scandal. There is a two-tiered level of justice when it comes to dealing with government misconduct, potential government criminality and potential criminality involving the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has the luxury of hiding behind cabinet confidentiality.
Today, in the ethics committee, I put it this way to the RCMP commissioner: Are Canadians to believe that the Prime Minister can engage in a whole host of criminal activities and simply hide behind the shield of cabinet confidentiality? He did not have a good response, I will admit. Certainly, that is what it looks like.
As a former Crown prosecutor, I can say that there was ample evidence to support the charge of obstruction of justice by the Prime Minister in his campaign of trying to influence the actions of the first indigenous attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould. However, again, the government would not release the documents. It would not release them to the Ethics Commissioner and certainly not to the RCMP.
However, the government talks about how independent the RCMP is. It talks about how it is going to be transparent and accountable. The Prime Minister promised Canadians that in 2015.
Madam Speaker, look at the mess they have created in the last eight years. They are the most corrupt government this country has ever seen. There is no question about that.
The member for Winnipeg North can laugh all he wants; he knows it is the truth. He knows how difficult it is, day after day, to sit in this House and defend the illegal actions of the government.
I have so much to say here that I do not even know where to begin.
Now the members of the NDP caucus are blindly following along with everything the Liberal government has to say. They are so hypocritical. They will challenge and they will fiercely try to argue that we should be holding the government to account, yet they blindly support it time after time. They voted with the Liberal government on at least eight occasions to continue funding this particular scam. If they had voted no on at least one occasion if not all of those occasions, I certainly would not be standing here today talking about the scandal and its cost to the taxpayers.
I will conclude with this. After eight years, the Liberal government has proven itself both financially incompetent and riddled with corruption. Common-sense Conservatives will get to the bottom of the scandal and bring home accountability for taxpayers.
Therefore I stand in the House today, along with my Conservative colleagues, to hold the government accountable for its reckless and irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars. Conservatives demand that the government take decisive action to recover all funds paid to the ArriveCAN contractors, and most importantly the subcontractors, who failed to deliver on their obligations. We are asking for that within 100 days of the motion's being adopted. We are calling on the Prime Minister to present a comprehensive report to the House demonstrating the successful repayment of the taxpayer funds.
This motion is a crucial step in bringing home accountability for Canadians, and it is well within the federal government's mandate. With a commitment to common-sense governance, Conservatives are steadfast in unravelling the scandal and restoring accountability for taxpayers. I encourage all members of the House to stand and support our common-sense motion.
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- Feb/27/24 5:15:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
Today, we are talking about costly criminal corruption, a three-in-one, right at the heart of the government. That is the arrive scam scandal. We found out today that the RCMP is investigating this costly criminal corruption. People are familiar with the arrive scam scandal. I think we should be calling it “the arrive scam scandals”, plural. There are multiple different scandals, and every time, at the public accounts committee and the government operations committee, we turn over a new leaf or a new stone. There is more to uncover, and it speaks to the rot, the crime, the corruption and the capricious disregard for public money that is at the heart of the NDP-Liberal government.
We heard today in committee from watchdogs, from the Auditor General's office, from the procurement ombudsman's office, that they are not at all surprised that the RCMP is investigating criminal behaviour in the context of the arrive scam scandal. We heard ministers in question period today, when they were asked about the RCMP investigation, say that it is no big deal and that of course the RCMP is looking into it.
We have come to a point, in Canada, after eight years of the Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal government, where ministers will say, unironically, that the RCMP investigating the behaviour of the government is not a big deal. It is true that there have been many different RCMP investigations involving conduct by and within the current government. However, we should never normalize or accept or tolerate, in Canada, the fact that there would be a government that has so debased our public institutions that it thinks it is normal for the RCMP to be investigating its bad behaviour.
What happened in the arrive scam scandal? It is the “arrive scam scandals”. There are many different things at the heart of this problem. We had at least $60 million spent on an app that should have cost $80,000. Many of those who worked on this did not actually do any work. GC Strategies, the company that received this contract, got $20 million for nothing. It simply received the contract and subcontracted it.
We do not just have the problem of the government contracting out work. We have the government contracting out to people who contract out. There are multiple layers and levels of subcontracting. It is essentially a two-person company that received this contract, did no work, had no IT expertise and subcontracted. It went on LinkedIn and found people who could do the work for them. It received $20 million for searching on LinkedIn.
I think a lot of Canadians would say, “I could get $20 million for just going on social media and looking for people who could do something”. That is the way this government operates. One gets $20 million for looking around on LinkedIn, if one is a well-connected insider.
We have no work done and millions of dollars going to GC Strategies for this process of getting contracts and subcontracting. Not only that, we know now, from the Auditor General's report, that the process was rigged. GC Strategies sat down with government officials to determine what the terms of the contract would be, which it would then bid on. The procurement ombudsman revealed that the terms of the contract were designed to drive up costs. They built a system that would incentivize driving up costs and would incentivize contractors to ask the government for more money instead of less.
Normal people look for opportunities to spend less when they buy things. This government built a system in which it was in the interests of contractors to charge more instead of less. It built a system that was structurally designed to protect insiders. It was built so that if one was not an insider, one could not get the contract. We have money for nothing, a rigged process, protection for insiders, a process designed to drive up costs.
As part of studying this issue at the government operations committee, we found out about faked résumés. GC Strategies, as part of trying to get work, submitted faked résumés. It said that it changed numbers around in résumés and just sent in the wrong version. However, it admitted under questioning that this insider company, as part of its process, changes numbers on résumés in order to make it compliant with the requirements.
If the government said that it needed someone with five years' experience and the person had five months of experience, GC Strategies' processes would be to change the number to five years to make it compliant, and then they would go back to the original subcontractor or resource and ask if it was okay that they changed the numbers. In one case, they did not even do that. They just sent in the false résumé.
Further, we have instances of tens of thousands of emails being deleted, with the Auditor General saying in so many cases that there is a complete absence of records. The Auditor General cannot confirm if records were destroyed or never existed, although we now have allegations of emails being deleted. We have senior public servants accusing each other of lying to the committee, accusing each other of faking health episodes in order to avoid accountability. We also have reprisals against senior public servants, public servants suspended without pay in the middle of an investigation after they give critical testimony.
That is money for no work; a rigged process and protection for insiders driving up costs; fake résumés; senior officials accusing each other of lying and reprisals among senior public servants. The result of all that was an app that went through 177 versions and sent over 10,000 people into quarantine as a result of a tech glitch, because they could not bother to test it. What a disaster. What a complete and utter disaster this arrive scam fiasco has been. After eight years, the government would say that the RCMP is investigating this whole family of scandals. That is just the way things work.
On this side of the House, we say no. We say that Canadians deserve clean, efficient, effective government and a government, by the way, in which elected leaders take responsibility. Liberals would have us believe that they had nothing to do with this. “Oh, my goodness, can you believe the things that happen to us when we're ministers? All these public servants are doing things that we know nothing about.” Our system is built on the principle of ministerial accountability, which is that ministers are responsible for what happens in their departments and ministers are responsible for the systems they create within their departments.
After eight years, the Prime Minister and his ministers have presided over the complete debasement of efficiency and integrity within the government. They have presided over a dramatic decline in the Government of Canada's ability to do anything efficiently or effectively. We have seen this across many different areas, that the ability of the Canadian state to deliver on basic services, to purchase an app, for example, has dramatically declined. However, the government would have us believe that this dramatic decline over the last years has nothing to do with it.
We have an increase in crime. We have struggles in the cost of living. We have an escalation in corruption. There is the cost, the crime and the corruption, but the government wants us to believe that the people in charge have nothing to do with the outcomes. Who are we going to blame for all these challenges our country is facing? It will not be the people in charge, surely.
We need to go back to a time when we have a government that is willing to take responsibility for what happens under its watch. We have seen this escalation in cost, crime and corruption, and it is the responsibility of the Prime Minister and his government, for what they did and what they fail to do to ensure integrity, effectiveness and fair processes within government.
This is why Conservatives have put forward a motion today that calls on the government to show the numbers, to account for the cost. It also calls for the money to be paid back. In cases where money was spent for no work, money should be paid back to the taxpayers. Canadians are struggling as a result of decisions made by the government. Canadians deserve to know the cost. They deserve to see the records of deleted emails. They deserve to see the information, and they deserve to have their money back.
Common-sense Conservatives will restore accountability and responsibility in government. When Conservatives are in office, we will no longer have ministers presiding over corruption, crime and chaos while claiming that they had nothing to do with it. We will have a government that axes the tax, builds the homes, fixes the budget, stops the crime, ends the corruption and treats taxpayers' dollars with respect.
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- Feb/27/24 6:26:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canada's common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. This is in contrast to the Liberal record. The Liberals have axed the homes, built the crime, hiked the tax and stopped the budgeting.
We are here to discuss the arrive scam scandal and, in particular, the procurement ombudsman's excellent report. Today, the procurement ombudsman was before the public accounts committee, and he confirmed that he is not at all surprised that the RCMP is now investigating the corruption at the heart of the government.
In the arrive scam scandal, we see multiple layers of costly criminal corruption in the government's procurement system. The procurement ombudsman found that the government built a system for procurement designed to encourage companies to charge the government more. This is really incredible. If they charged too little, their bids or points might be removed, so the incentive was built right into the system for companies to charge more.
The procurement ombudsman found a chronic problem of so-called bait and switch. This is where the bidding company says it is going to have one person do the work, then it switches and has someone else do the work, someone who is potentially substantially less qualified. This builds on what we already know: GC Strategies, the company that got the ArriveCAN contract, was changing and falsifying resumés they submitted to the government, and the government rigged the process.
Members of the government sat down with the GC Strategies team to set the terms of the contract, such that GC Strategies would get the deal. This is a two-person company that subcontracts all the actual work, and yet the government sat down with this company and rigged the process so it would get the contracts. It built a system that would favour insiders to ensure GC Strategies got the deal. On top of that, it designed a process that would encourage GC Strategies and others to charge the government more, not less.
It is no wonder that spending is out of control and that Canadians are struggling under the pressure of higher taxes and the impact of higher deficits. When the government designs contracting-out processes, it designs systems to try to charge more. The levels of cost, crime and corruption we see in this arrive scam scandal are really incredible.
The RCMP is investigating. I asked the Prime Minister today whether the government will co-operate with the RCMP investigation. There was no answer. We had the procurement ombudsman's investigation report and the Auditor General's report, which reveal what happened. However, we now need to identify who the responsible individuals are and why they did it. Why was the process rigged in order to give this deal to this two-person company working out of a basement? Why was it rigged to GC Strategies' advantage? Why did the government create a system designed to charge taxpayers more, not less?
These are the key questions that need to be answered by the government, but I will distill it into one simple point. The RCMP is now investigating criminal behaviour as part of the arrive scam scandal. The parliamentary secretary was formerly with the Ontario government and has a great deal of experience dealing with issues of corruption. Could he tell the House, yes or no, whether the government will co-operate with the RCMP's investigation?
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- Feb/27/24 6:35:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is truly incredible listening to that member talk.
This government has been in power for eight years. It has broken the procurement system in this country, and the Liberals speak about problems that happened as if they have no responsibility for what happens under their watch. This government is supposed to be in charge and it refuses to take responsibility for the costs, the corruption and the criminality that we now see as part of the ArriveCAN system.
The Liberals want us to believe that, well, it was an emergency and the ArriveCAN app was necessary. This app went through 177 different versions, it sent over 10,000 people into quarantine by accident and the versions were not properly tested. They hired two people with no IT experience. There are no excuses, and this government should take responsibility.
Again, will the government co-operate with the RCMP investigation into criminality, yes or no?
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