44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 27, 2024 10:00AM
- Feb/27/24 11:32:21 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, nearly two weeks ago, the Auditor General released a scathing report regarding the government's handling of the ArriveCAN app. The Auditor General said that the management of the app was one of the worst examples she has seen in her career.
Now we are learning that the ArriveCAN file is just the tip of the iceberg. The purpose of the app was for people to register travel with the CBSA in the context of COVID‑19. The app was supposed to cost $80,000. Another company said it would have cost about $250,000 to develop. We are talking about an app that cost only $12 million in France for a population of 70 million people. I could name other examples where this app cost far less in other countries. Unfortunately, in Canada, it cost nearly $60 million.
I mentioned the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, the Auditor General and her team could not even put an exact figure on the cost of the app. That is where the problem starts. That is the crux of the problem. It has to do with a procurement process that was completely disregarded. The Auditor General and the procurement ombud have come forward with some pretty serious allegations that Public Services and Procurement Canada and other departments simply did not follow what is supposed to be an exemplary procurement process worthy of a G7 country.
Here are a few examples. The average daily cost for this app was about $1,090, whereas it is usually around $675 for IT positions.
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- Feb/27/24 12:18:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for New Brunswick Southwest.
The arrive scam boondoggle has rightly put the government’s mismanagement of taxpayer dollars in the spotlight. At one point everyone in the government wanted to be associated with the ArriveCAN app, touting it as one of the greatest things a government had ever accomplished. Now, with the Auditor General's report, nobody wants to take accountability for this mess, and it is no wonder.
As we have discovered, we have an application that started out with a price tag of $80,000 that ballooned to $60 million and counting. It now appears, according to the Auditor General, that we will never know the true cost of this application, given the lack of information available for her to do a proper audit. We can add to this the procurement ombud's report that found that 76% of all resources proposed by the contractors to do the work in fact did not. Finally, a two-person company that did no actual IT work was paid almost $20 million.
Liberal politicians who once championed the app are now backing away from it, pointing the finger at the public service, while senior public servants are all pointing their fingers at each other.
When the Conservatives introduced the study of ArriveCAN in committee, we knew that there was more to the story than what the government was telling. That is why we introduced a motion in this place calling for the Auditor General to conduct a performance audit, including of the payments, contracts and subcontracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app. The audit confirmed our suspicions and went even further.
Just last week, we heard testimony in committee from two former CBSA employees, who have been suspended without pay even though they now work in different departments. These two former employees were highly critical of the actions of senior bureaucrats at CBSA, including the president, who they allege was attempting to mislead the committee and withhold information.
When parliamentarians are confronted with evidence of reprisals and allegations of misconduct and an active cover-up, we cannot trust the Prime Minister’s department to investigate itself. We know how these investigations end: Liberal insiders get off easy while others take the fall. We saw this clearly in the SNC-Lavalin case. SNC-Lavalin got off with a slap on the wrist, but Jody Wilson-Raybould was removed from cabinet and caucus, all for standing up for the rule of law on behalf of Canadians.
The Prime Minister is not interested in upholding the rule of law; he is interested in removing blame from himself and his buddies, pinning the blame on others and punishing them harshly.
Our study on ArriveCAN has uncovered large-scale misconduct across multiple government departments. The procurement ombud found widespread disregard for the rules of procurement by the Canada Border Services Agency, Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The Auditor General referred to the glaring lack of documentation as the worst she had ever seen. In her report and in testimony before committee, she stated several times that the pandemic was not an excuse for the lack of documentation and glaring mismanagement across the ArriveCAN contracts.
This glaring mismanagement is completely unacceptable, especially when taxpayers are on the hook for tens of millions of dollars. This boondoggle has led to Canadians overpaying for an app that sent thousands of Canadians unjustly into quarantine.
The Auditor General also confirmed at committee that the lack of documentation pointed to two possibilities: the first being that the documents never existed in the first place and that the government just was not doing its job in keeping track of taxpayer dollars; and the second being that the documents had been destroyed.
While this second possibility may seem far-fetched, it has been reported in the media that an IT employee at the CBSA has claimed that the former vice president and chief information officer of the CBSA deleted four years' worth of emails. This is extremely troubling and is outrageous, as one of my colleagues said.
One of the Prime Minister's top bureaucrats has been accused of deleting four years' worth of emails from his time at the CBSA, particularly during the time of the ArriveCAN procurement. Now this bureaucrat, who has since been promoted to chief technology officer of Canada, is refusing to provide answers.
It is alarming to the Conservatives that senior members of the government's bureaucracy are being accused of lying to and misleading parliamentarians in committees and refusing to answer our questions. In addition to this, we have had to deal with constant Liberal filibustering at committee. The persistence of the Liberals to stall our study of the arrive scam makes us wonder what they have to hide.
The mismanagement of ArriveCAN is indicative of the way the NDP-Liberal government has been running the country over the last eight years. It has wasted taxpayer dollars, increasing its deficits to new heights each year. It has created a cost-of-living crisis, making it difficult for Canadians to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. It has failed to deliver for Canadians on every level, yet the Liberals refuse to take any responsibility for their failed policies and eight years of failed governance. However, Canadians know who is responsible.
While the cost of living continues to go up and the quality of life continues to go down for Canadians, the Liberals are afraid to face Canadians with what they have done to our country, and the New Democrats have simply lost their way. The NDP, once called the workers' party, has bargained away its responsibility as an opposition party and is now more focused on blindly supporting the Liberals than on stopping the damage it is inflicting on working-class Canadians. While it supports the disastrous overspending of the government, allowing it to do whatever it wants, the NDP's only demand is that the Liberals spend more.
With the emerging scandal around the arrive scam, the New Democrats have been feigning outrage at the Liberal government, but, as has been noted by the Leader of the Opposition, they voted in favour of the arrive scam eight times. The New Democrats had their chance to stand against it, but did not. Now they are pretending to be shocked by all the money spent on the app.
The NDP presents itself as an opposition party, but this act is falling apart. Despite the New Democrats' best efforts to put on a show of holding the government to account, their actions are clear to all Canadians. By continuing to prop up the Liberals year after year, they have intertwined themselves with the Liberals so tightly that it is difficult to tell them apart. Canadians are not fooled by their faux outrage at their coalition partners. If they truly believe in their record, they will stop propping up the Liberal government and its failed policies, and allow Canadians to decide who they want to lead them forward.
It is important to remember that in the midst of the pandemic, the Prime Minister called an election in a thinly disguised last-ditch effort to recapture a majority government. Failing that, he was then able to fall back on his good friend, the leader of the NDP, to give him the majority he so desperately needed. Canadians do not support the coalition government; they want change. Canadians want answers for the arrive scam. Canadians want to end this cover-up coalition.
In the face of the corrupt NDP-Liberal coalition, the Conservatives will continue to fight for accountability and against a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, that is why we are also calling on the government to collect and recover all monies paid to ArriveCAN contractors and subcontractors who did not work on the ArriveCAN app, within 100 days of the adoption of this motion. We are also calling on the Prime Minister to table a report in the House showing that public funds have been reimbursed. This is the ultimate accountability that the government can demonstrate.
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- Feb/27/24 2:13:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while the common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, this Prime Minister, backed by the Bloc Québécois, is not worth the cost.
Speaking of crime, today we learned that the RCMP is going to conduct a full investigation into the ArriveCAN scandal. Even so, we also need the House to support our motion, as the Auditor General of Canada has determined that the app has cost taxpayers at least $60 million. The procurement ombud also found that 76% of ArriveCAN's contractors performed no work. GC Strategies was paid nearly $20 million in connection with this app.
Unfortunately, Quebeckers cannot trust the Bloc Québécois to scrutinize government spending. Its own leader has admitted as much. What is more, the Bloc voted in favour of this exorbitant spending eight times.
Now all parties have a chance to band together to recover the millions lost to the ArriveCAN app by supporting our motion.
There are two things we want today: for the Prime Minister to co-operate with the RCMP investigation and vote for our Conservative motion.
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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 2:27:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that answer just proves that, after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
It is not just that a million more people will visit food banks this year than in last year's record-smashing year; it is that now there is a large Facebook group of 8,000 people who call themselves the “Dumpster Diving Network”. So desperate are they that, not only can they not afford groceries or find food at food banks, they are literally jumping into garbage cans to find food.
How desperate do Canadians have to get before the government will finally axe its tax on food?
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- Feb/27/24 2:33:35 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. The NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, and he is going to make everything more expensive on April 1, with another carbon tax hike; the effects on Canadians are devastating.
A new report from GoFundMe says that Canadians started 200,000 online charity drives to help raise money just to cover day-to-day expenses.
Instead of forcing Canadians to ask for help from online crowdsourcing campaigns, why does the Prime Minister not do the obvious thing, cancel his carbon tax hike and stop making things more expensive?
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- Feb/27/24 2:34:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are going to axe the tax and leave the money in Canadians' pockets in the first place. Canadians are not fooled by this shell game. They know the rebate does not cover all the costs of the carbon tax; manufacturers and producers raise their prices to pay their share of the carbon tax, and all that gets passed on to consumers.
Sites like GoFundMe used to be used to help children who lost their parents tragically; now Canadians are turning to crowdsourcing to help pay their food bills. Officials say that 56,000 campaigns were started just to pay for the cost of food alone.
Why does the Prime Minister not just axe the tax so prices can come down?
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- Feb/27/24 2:59:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if my colleague were more aware of what is happening in Canada, he would know that after eight years under this Liberal Prime Minister, two million people are going to food banks every month. Food banks are now lining up to get the food they need to feed the lines of hungry people. That is what Canada looks like under this Prime Minister.
The Liberal government, with Bloc support, managed to find a way to spend at least $60 million on an app that was supposed to cost $80,000.
I will repeat my question. Is the Prime Minister going to voluntarily co-operate with the RCMP, or is he going to cover up the arrive scam yet again?
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- Feb/27/24 3:32:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me summarize what I talked about during the first minutes of my speech.
I talked about the fact that the ArriveCAN application could not have been developed for $80,000, but it should not have cost $60 million either. We talked about the paper cost of this application. Had we processed 60 million transactions, it would have cost $180 million. We talked about the valuation of an application as such. If it were an e-commerce application, transactions at the transactional level, it would have been hundreds of millions of dollars.
This perspective is vital in understanding the true value of ArriveCAN. The app's development cost, while substantial, represented just one aspect of its overall contributions. The efficiency, safety and economic benefits it delivered during a critical time offers a more comprehensive picture of its value to Canada and its citizens.
Our commitment to rectifying the identified shortcomings in the ArriveCAN project extend beyond mere acknowledgement. The departments are actively implementing measures to enhance the procurement and project management practices to prevent such discrepancies in the future. These efforts are crucial in restoring public trust and ensuring that taxpayer funds are utilized effectively and responsibly.
We recognize that there is more work to be done. The journey toward improving our procurement processes and ensuring the efficient use of public funds is ongoing. However, it is important for Canadians to know that these steps toward corrective action are not merely planned; they are already in motion.
As we move forward, we will continue to support the ongoing work of investigators and auditors. We welcome their recommendations and are committed to implementing them to strengthen our procurement practices further. The Government of Canada remains resolute in its pledge to uphold the principles of accountability, transparency, process integrity and value for money in all its endeavours.
Let me reiterate our unwavering dedication to learning from the ArriveCAN experience. Our goal is to ensure that our responses to any challenges are both effective and aligned with the prudent management of public resources.
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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 4:59:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from OGGO, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. I think if we have three OGGOs in a row we will have an OGGO hat trick.
I rise to speak on ArriveCAN. As it has consumed my life for the last year, why not continue to speak about it today on our opposition day motion?
ArriveCAN to me seems to be a symbol of our government's inability to do procurement right and how the procurement practices of the government have descended into chaos. ArriveCAN we know is a hot mess. We have heard of tens of thousands of emails having been deleted and records lost or perhaps not even kept in the first place. We do not know the final cost of ArriveCAN and there are too many opinions out there as to what it actually cost, whether it was $80,000, $6 million, $60 million or, as the Auditor General has said, we do not have the records to actually say what the final cost is.
We have heard of many updates to the program. There were 177. At the same time, we have also heard from the Auditor General and PHAC that the updates were not tested before being rolled out to the public. Of course, we heard of the 10,000 people who were sent into quarantine in error because it apparently was not tested. Whatever the cost was, $6 million, $60 million, one would think it would have been tested. At the same time, we also heard from bureaucrats in the CBSA who said that everything was tested, so we have a problem here. We cannot get a straight answer on what went on with ArriveCAN.
I will note that the head of PHAC, when asked about the testing, commented that it was too busy to test it. I can see Air Canada doing that without testing, but can members imagine any other company coming out with an important update that affects the lives of people without testing it? Apparently, the government did not. Again, the problem is that we have not received a straight answer.
Getting back to the ArriveCAN set-up, we heard that there were 177 updates. We knew things were changing during the pandemic, but we did not have 177 changes to help people who were coming across the borders, or 177 different ways to identify whether they had been vaccinated or not. It seems to be that the problem was with the procurement process for all of these changes, each one costing more money, willy-nilly done by PHAC or an order in council from the government without any thought to the consequences.
As I mentioned in a previous question to my colleague, the parliamentary secretary for public works, we heard the procurement ombudsman talk about bait and switch. If people want to know what bait and switch is, the easiest way for me to explain it is this. Basically, companies promise a higher level of services to the government and then substitute a lower level. Perhaps it would be like someone going to a speaker's service to hire a speaker for an event. The service promises to have the Leader of the Opposition come and therefore will charge a certain amount, but perhaps the member for Edmonton West shows up. Even if the speech is not as good, the client would still have to pay the full amount. That is what is happening and the procurement ombudsman has stated that this bait and switch program is systemic throughout the government.
We also heard how it started as a program within the Public Health Agency of Canada and then transferred over eventually to the CBSA. The program transferred over the work, but it did not seem to transfer over the accountability. All we get is finger-pointing. We have seen people blaming GC Strategies for bidding on and receiving the work. We have blamed Dalian and Coradix for getting the work. When I say “we”, I mean the system, the government. We have blamed directors general within the CBSA saying that they were responsible for procurement even though that was not their role, and that they were responsible for the contracts even though it is the chief financial officers who signed. We heard today that the system is to blame.
Do members know that we have not heard from the government who is to blame. What about the ministers? I have to ask: Where was the Minister of Health in all of this when PHAC was spinning out of control and flashing money at the system without any thought to the taxpayers?
Where was the Minister of Public Safety when all these problems were going on with CBSA? Where was the Treasury Board president when, through the supplementary estimates process, money was added? The Treasury Board would have had to approve that submission to begin with. Where was the Treasury Board president to ask where the government was to take responsibility, instead of blaming the contractors or the people within the public service?
I want to read a quote from pm.gc.ca, PM meaning the Prime Minister. This is from the website:
Open and Accountable Government sets out core principles regarding the roles and responsibilities of Ministers in Canada’s system of responsible...government. This includes the central tenet of ministerial responsibility...individual and collective....
This is right from the Prime Minister's website. Anyone can google it right now. It is about ministerial responsibility, yet we have none with this. We have $60 million, perhaps more, perhaps less, spent without a single minister asking once why we were spending so much money, or why we were not testing this program. We should have had several ministers step up when 10,000 Canadians were sent into quarantine in error. They should have followed up and asked why we were not testing it before it was rolled out. Not a single minister stepped up and apologized. Instead, we have public servants being scapegoated, contractors being blamed and a system being blamed, but there is nothing from the ministers.
We also heard how PSPC, in its role as procurement officers for the country, pushed back against CBSA for some excessive things in this program. When CBSA thanked them for the advice but still went ahead with that misguided process, PSPC just shrugged and said that it was nice and that it did its part. Doing its part by simply saying it does not like something and walking away shows that PSPC is not taking its role seriously.
This brings me back to a similar issue with CBSA and PSPC a couple of years ago with the Nuctech scandal. Nuctech is basically the Chinese screening version of Huawei. Worldwide, it provides screeners controlled by the PRC, and CBSA decided it was going to put those machines in every single one of our embassies around the entire country. They are machines that, once they had screened people, would send that information to the Chinese government.
PSPC actually stepped in and said that it was a security concern and that it should not be done. CBSA plowed ahead and did it anyway. Again, we have to ask PSPC what its purpose was if it was not going to stop them and enforce these rules. Funny enough, when it came up at OGGO, when we stepped in and brought this to light, the government's response was to hire Deloitte to do a contract to study the Nuctech issue.
There was $250,000 outsourced to a management contractor, and it came up with a 24-page fluff report basically stating not to buy sensitive security tech equipment from despotic regimes. Thank heaven for Deloitte, and thank heaven for that $250,000. Think of how many contracts could have gone to Putin or to Kim Jong-un without the Liberals' and Deloitte's $250,000 to say not to buy sensitive security equipment from despotic regimes.
It is clear that the Liberal government does not care about taxpayers' money. It is clear that PSPC, CBSA and the ministers are not doing their jobs to follow the rules, to protect taxpayers' money, to ensure that the rules are followed and that we actually have value for money.
The Conservative government will fix this. We will ensure the rules are followed. We will axe the tax. We will build homes. We will fix the budget. We will stop crime. We will fix procurement in this country.
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