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House Hansard - 286

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 27, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 286 - Feb/27/24
Mr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC)
  • 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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Context: House Hansard - 286 - Feb/27/24
Mr. Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway, NDP)
  • Feb/27/24 5:12:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one thing the New Democrats agree with the Conservatives on is that it is always wrong when taxpayer dollars are wasted in unnecessary procurement. The structural problem here is a series of successive federal governments that contract out work instead of using the public sector to provide these services. I was in the House when I watched the Conservatives contract out the Phoenix pay system, which was supposed to save $80 million. It ended up costing over $2 billion, and it does not even work. Now, we see the Liberals contract out this work to ArriveCAN, and we see similar results. Does my hon. colleague not agree with the NDP that it is time we use the talents and the skills of Canada's public servants to deliver these kinds of services, instead of giving money to the private sector contractors who are more interested in profit and the ability to abscond with money than they are in providing real value to the taxpayers of this country?
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