44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 27, 2024 10:00AM
- Feb/27/24 10:32:39 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservative members are all worked up. I get it. Today is their opposition day.
I am going to try to ask the Conservative leader a direct question, but I have no illusions. I do not expect an answer because he plays exactly the same political games as the Prime Minister: He refuses to answer difficult questions and tosses around political slogans. Still, I will give it a try.
When the member for Carleton was parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, from 2011 to 2013, his department awarded $6.5 million to the owners of GC Strategies, the same persons currently involved in the ArriveCAN matter, but operating under a different name back then.
Could the Conservative leader tell us what that money was used for and how it was spent?
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- Feb/27/24 11:14:10 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed that unanimous consent was not given to table these very important documents, which are very revealing of how the previous government managed things. I am also shocked by the obvious cozy relationship that existed between the previous Conservative government and this firm, and the very lax contracting policies that left us documents with words such as “work unspecified”.
Does the member not feel that perhaps this cozy relationship and these lax practices might have emboldened GC Strategies going forward?
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- Feb/27/24 11:43:43 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague from the Bloc Québécois. In her speech, our Liberal colleague talked about the contract awarded to GC Strategies, a company formed in 2015. We have heard that this company had a number of contracts with the Government of Canada before that. However, the company did not exist before 2015. What does that mean?
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- Feb/27/24 11:44:28 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for throwing me such a softball, so to speak, since it is really quite simple.
The two people who founded GC Strategies had already founded a company called Coredal Systems Consulting. That company has had contracts with the Canadian government since 2007, so under the Conservatives. In 2015, they dissolved Coredal and transitioned that company into GC Strategies. That information is very easy to find on the open government website. It was a typical name change that just happened to coincide with a change in government.
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- Feb/27/24 11:57:09 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, for me there are a couple of issues, and I will very quickly break it down. There is the procurement process, but there is also, from my perspective and what I think my constituents would be saying to me, the question of how one company gets into a position in which it could do what GC Strategies actually was able to do.
Part of it is that we have to look at the origins of the company, which had actually been around for many years; it was under a new name, of course, as it had been under Coredal. I wonder whether the member could provide his thoughts on that aspect. To what degree should we be looking at how a company could surface and get into a situation like we find ourselves in today?
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- Feb/27/24 12:01:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think we all agree, at least within the opposition parties, that this is a real mess.
As we have said, we will unequivocally support the Conservative motion.
That said, I would like to ask my colleague if he would agree that the Conservative leader has been rather quiet about the fact that, while he was parliamentary secretary to the transportation minister, his department awarded $6.5 million to the owners of GC Strategies.
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- Feb/27/24 12:12:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we do keep records of who voted for what during budget deliberations, so I would ask this member how he can go back to his riding, when he voted eight times to ensure that GC Strategies got tens of millions of dollars. He talks about the corporate parties. He literally is propping up the Liberal government to ensure the ad scam continues. GC Strategies is still getting money because of his vote. It is actually quite embarrassing.
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- Feb/27/24 12:16:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we are seeing yet another big mess coming out of the cross-party consensus within the Ottawa coalition, as I like to call it. It is the fact that Ottawa keeps delegating important aspects of policy decisions and government decisions to big companies, some of which, like McKinsey, have fingers in many pies.
In this case, a company with only two employees was entrusted with the task despite a 40% increase in the federal public service. It is a cross-party consensus because, although this is currently a Liberal scandal, we might say that it really started when the member for Carleton was parliamentary secretary for the Department of Transport from 2011 to 2013. His department awarded $6.5 million to the owners of GC Strategies, the company involved in the ArriveCAN affair. It was called something else at the time.
Does my colleague not think that the Conservative leader is staying pretty quiet on this?
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- Feb/27/24 1:34:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is pretty pathetic, as far as debates go. I have been here in the House since this morning, listening to what is going on. Once again, the Liberals are slinging mud at the Conservatives in a bid to bury their own mistakes and their own scandals, and the Conservatives are slinging mud right back at the Liberals.
For us in the Bloc Québécois, they are one and the same. It is six of one and half a dozen of the other. Whether it is one or the other, we face the same problems of wasted public funds.
The Conservatives have been slinging a lot of mud today. When the member for Carleton was the transport minister from 2011 to 2013, he himself awarded a $6.5‑million contract to the owner of GC Strategies, which went by another name at the time. I would like my colleague to tell me how he feels about this morning's revelation.
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- Feb/27/24 1:47:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am really curious how this could happen. The Conservatives awarded millions of dollars of contracts to the very same company that the member just called “infamous GC Strategies”, and said that it “does not even do any work”. Would their opposition day motion be more complete and get to the bottom of this issue if it included the millions of dollars that the Conservative Party awarded to this very company, which apparently did not do any IT work? By the way, they were sole-sourced contracts for IT, and the Leader of the Opposition was the parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport when a majority of these contracts were issued to Transport Canada. How did this happen?
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- Feb/27/24 1:48:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this would be impossible. What year was GC Strategies incorporated? It was incorporated in 2015.
Canadians need only to look at the $23.6-billion deficit. Contracting is up 60% with this government in the last eight or nine years.
I refuse to accept the Liberals' attempt to, once again, cover up their use of such a company. Again, the facts speak for themselves. This company was not even incorporated until 2015, when—
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- Feb/27/24 4:06:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, they have to recognize the irony. The member just finished calling into question the integrity of GC Strategies; I do not blame him, quite frankly, for doing that. What the member does not necessarily realize is that it is the very same company, just with a name change. The two people he has just criticized are the same people who ran Coredal Systems Consulting. By the way, his leader actually gave millions of dollars in contracts to them. Can he not see a bit of irony there?
Does the member not agree that maybe we should be looking at how one company was able to evolve to the point where we have the problem that we have today? There is no doubt that the member's leader played some role in it.
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- Feb/27/24 4:07:39 p.m.
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That is appalling, Madam Speaker.
The Leader of the Opposition was clear today. Yes, we need to investigate all of the contracts that were awarded. The member for Winnipeg North is talking about a few million dollars under the Conservatives. Yes, he is right.
However, we are talking about a total of $250 million that this government allegedly paid to GC Strategies, $250 million. The Liberals doubled the amounts that are given to consultants. They are now spending $20 billion a year on consultants when the public service has grown in size.
I think it is rather ironic to hear the member for Winnipeg North trying to lecture us when I have in front of me the report on ArriveCAN that indicates that the Liberals have no control over public spending.
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- Feb/27/24 4:21:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the word that comes to mind is “wow”. That is quite the extreme statement coming from the member. So much for facts. I hope he does not believe 90% of the things he said.
The question that comes to mind is this. I wonder whether he would hold the very same standard to his own leader, who was responsible for the issuing of millions of dollars in contracts to Coredal Systems Consulting Inc., the very same people who are with GC Strategies. Would he apply the same principles to the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada that he is applying to others? Maybe he should skip the character assassinations and focus on the issue.
If he is not going to answer that question, maybe he could offer an idea from Conservatives as to how we can improve the procurement process.
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- Feb/27/24 4:23:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have the pleasure of working with my colleague at the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates and since October 2022 we have been studying the issue of ArriveCAN, with its tens of thousands of pages to read. It is fascinating.
A notice of motion was introduced about Coredal Systems Consulting, which had the same owners as GC Strategies. I wonder how many other businesses we should be looking into.
Does my colleague think that the system that was exposed through ArriveCAN might be even bigger and more widespread than we might think?
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- Feb/27/24 4:24:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I too enjoy working with my friend on a number of committees. I always value her sage advice, her thoughtful questions and the probing way she too wants to get to the bottom of this. I think she touched upon a very important point.
We are basically speaking in the House about GC Strategies and what it did to the procurement process within the arrive scam context. However, with respect to the broader point and to respond to my colleague, I think it is symbolic of what has been allowed to occur with the corrupt Liberal government. If it occurred with arrive scam, one only has to wonder how many other millions, if not billions, of wasted dollars have gone to other similar contractors and subcontractors, so I think there is an excellent opportunity to expand this in many other ways onto many other committees.
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- Feb/27/24 4:25:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we do know that when the Conservatives were in power, they gave over $7 million to GC Strategies under its former name. We know that $4 million of those contracts was awarded when the Leader of the Opposition was the parliamentary secretary, and of course we know that the Phoenix scandal, which the Auditor General has compared to ArriveCAN, has the same sort of scandal behind it. Phoenix, of course, was done under the Conservatives' government.
I have a question for the member, though. I appreciate the discussion today and have no problem going after GC Strategies, but I am interested to hear whether the member thinks we should also be looking at McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, KPMG and Ernst and Young, which are also getting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars.
I am just wondering.
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- Feb/27/24 5:09:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member did good in terms of the lines, so the programming worked in that sense, I must say.
My question to the member is about something I raised previously with respect to his own leader. The leader of the Conservative Party was the minister ultimately responsible for millions of dollars' worth of grants that went to Coredal Systems Consulting, which is the same company as GC Strategies with just a change in name. The same two individuals are involved in both companies.
Does he believe this should also be considered? Many constituents who we represent are wondering how two individuals get to the point where they were able to do what they did through the procurement process. I think that going back to the origins of the company would be a good thing.
Would he not agree?
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- Feb/27/24 5:25:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, he almost forgot his lines.
It is interesting. He said “well-connected insider”, referring to GC Strategies. Those well-connected insiders are the very same insiders that the leader of the Conservative Party gave literally millions of dollars to while he was a parliamentary secretary in the Harper government.
Would he not apply the very same principles that he just finished espousing to his own leader today? Did that leader make a mistake back then?
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- Feb/27/24 5:25:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is sad to see the desperation of the parliamentary secretary across the way.
Here are the facts: GC Strategies was incorporated immediately after the Prime Minister took office. The Prime Minister came into office eight years ago, promising sunny ways. Do members remember that? It sure was sunny for GC Strategies.
GC Strategies was incorporated as soon as the Prime Minister took office, and it did a quarter of a billion dollars' worth of business with the Liberal government. Even in the eyes of the Liberal government, it is actually real money we are talking about. A quarter of a billion dollars went to this two-person company. All it did was receive contracts, go on LinkedIn to find someone else to do the job, and—
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