SoVote

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

Feb/27/24 1:33:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it sounds like the parliamentary secretary was talking about my Twitter. It is @MikeBarrettON, if he wants to follow it or if he wants to like that post and share it. Tens of thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, of people are doing that every day. After eight years of the scandal-plagued NDP-Liberal government and its partnership in the cover-up coalition, Canadians are exhausted. They are also out of cash and pretty soon the Liberal government will be out of time.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/27/24 1:33:51 p.m.
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During the response, the hon. parliamentary secretary also attempted to intervene, as did others. I want to remind members that when someone has the floor, if others have questions or comments or if they want to contribute to the debate, they should wait until the appropriate time. The hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert.

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Mr. Denis Trudel (Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, BQ)

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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Mr. Michael Barrett

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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Mr. Gord Johns (Courtenay—Alberni, NDP)

Feb/27/24 1:35:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, again, under the Conservative government, the outsourcing to highly paid consulting firms doubled. Under the Liberal government, it has gone up fourfold. The ArriveCAN fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg. We have been calling for the government, and for the government operations committee, to investigate the big six consulting firms. We saw Deloitte with over $100 million in contracts just last year. Already this year, it is at $275 million. Deloitte is run by a former Conservative cabinet minister who is the managing director. We put forward a motion to expand the study to include Deloitte. People should have seen the room. Panic ensued, and the Conservatives delayed voting on it, not once but at three meetings. Will the Conservatives stop blocking and let an investigation ensue on the big corporations, including Deloitte, or are they going to continue to work with the Liberals in protecting their friends and the highly paid consultants through their corporate-controlled parties?

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Mr. Michael Barrett

Feb/27/24 1:37:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the cover-up coalition is just that. It has an agreement. The NDP support the Liberal government on all orders of things. In exchange for that, the NDP did not get a seat at the cabinet table, but it does have veto power. The NDP also has the opportunity to not support the Liberal government when it is increasing funding to outside consultants, which is exactly this case. That member voted more than a half-dozen times to increase spending, with $20 million going to one outside consulting company. How many public servants could be hired with the tens of millions of dollars that were spent on the arrive scam that went to consultants making 30%, but did no actual work on the app? Dozens. Where was the NDP? It was in lockstep with the scandal-plagued Prime Minister. It is a shame.

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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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Ms. Jennifer O'Connell (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety, Democratic Institutions and Intergovernmental Affairs (Cybersecurity), Lib.)

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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Mrs. Stephanie Kusie

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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Ms. Jennifer O'Connell

Feb/27/24 1:49:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, on a point of order, I ask for unanimous consent to table the Conservative contracts as well as—

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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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Mrs. Stephanie Kusie

Feb/27/24 1:50:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is the extent to which the Liberal government will go to complete its cover-up. It will do anything to maintain power. It will do anything to hide the truth from Canadians, but Canadians are catching on to this. They may have fallen for the sunny ways in the beginning, but the clouds are out now and people can hear the thunderstorm.

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Mr. Gord Johns (Courtenay—Alberni, NDP)

Feb/27/24 1:50:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to raise it again. The ArriveCAN scandal fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg. We have watched companies like Deloitte go from $11 million to $275 million a year. These are highly paid consulting firms, and the NDP put forward a motion to expand the investigation to look at all outsourcing, including these big corporations. I have asked Conservatives all day long why they will not talk about expanding it and actually moving forward with an investigation. Is it because one of the former Conservative cabinet ministers is a senior managing director at Deloitte? Will they comment on why the corporate-controlled parties are working together so that we do not have a full investigation into the outsourcing spending by both of these parties, which is out of control?

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Mrs. Stephanie Kusie

Feb/27/24 1:51:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it has been pointed out that the NDP voted with its Liberal coalition partners a minimum of eight times to secure the funding for arrive scam. I will also point out that this member in particular is guilty of this, because he entirely conspired with the Liberal government to obstruct documentation in our McKinsey study last year. He can say what he wants, but he has been completely complicit with this Liberal partner.

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Mr. Marty Morantz (Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, CPC)

Feb/27/24 1:52:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, do you know the one thing Canadians actually want? They want their $60 million back. I have not heard a single Liberal member, including the member for Winnipeg North, say that they are going to do everything they can to get this money back. I would like my colleague to give me her opinion as to why she thinks the Liberals are not even interested in getting this money back for Canadians.

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Mrs. Stephanie Kusie

Feb/27/24 1:53:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is because, frankly, the Liberal government does not care. It is completely tone-deaf to the desperation of the average Canadian. There is one solution for Canada, and that is a Conservative government led by the member for Carleton.

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Mr. Majid Jowhari (Richmond Hill, Lib.)

Feb/27/24 1:53:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Vaughan—Woodbridge. As members of the House, we share a profound duty to ensure that public funds are used effectively and for the public good. This principle is paramount, especially in times of crisis, when swift action is necessary and resources are stretched thin. The COVID-19 pandemic presented unprecedented challenges requiring urgent and innovative responses. Among them was the development of the ArriveCAN app, a tool swiftly implemented to manage the risks associated with international travel during the pandemic. It is crucial to recognize the context in which ArriveCAN was developed. It was a period marked by uncertainty and the urgent need to protect public health. ArriveCAN was instrumental in mitigating the spread of the virus by international travel. By simplifying the submission of travel and health information for individuals entering Canada, it made a substantial contribution to our efforts to manage the pandemic effectively. Drawing from my background in IT consultancy and project management, I aim to provide a nuanced perspective on ArriveCAN, which may not have been shared in the House as of yet. I will focus on three aspects: the development process, cost avoidance and its true valuation. I will start with the development process. In addressing the development cycle of ArriveCAN, it is important to highlight the extraordinary circumstances under which the application was developed. Traditionally, a development life cycle spans several sequential phases over approximately nine months to a year. These sequential phases are complete business requirements, looking at scope finalization, solution design and solution development, doing testing and piloting, and rolling out and supporting. The total requirements were 177 different functionalities that the app had to do. However, given the urgent demand created by the pandemic, we shifted to a rapid, agile methodology, progressing on a requirement-by-requirement basis. As the requirements kept evolving and the number of stakeholders, such as the provinces, PHAC, the World Health Organization, security and data protection put extra requirements on how this application was evolving, this approach allowed us to dynamically integrate new requirements as they emerged, ensuring the app was continually updated and adapted to respond to the evolving pandemic situation. This agile development strategy not only expedited the app's rollout but also ensured its flexibility and responsiveness to public needs. This type of development, by virtue of the fact that requirements come at different stages rather than all being identified up front, leads to an increased cost of development. I do not want to justify the $60 million, because I think there is a lot of room for improvement on that. Nevertheless, through our discussions and the examination by the Auditor General and the procurement ombudsman, it has become evident that there are concerns regarding the financial management and procurement processes of the ArriveCAN app. While these concerns are valid and demand our attention, it is essential to contextualize the financial aspects of the app within the broader scope of pandemic management and the digital transformation. It is also crucial to discuss the cost savings or cost avoidance facilitated by ArriveCAN. Replacing the traditional paper-based system, the app presented a significant advantage in terms of cost-efficiency. The estimated cost of processing each paper transaction was $3 per transaction. Taking into account that this app was used over 60 million times, this would total anywhere from $120 million to about $180 million in potential cost savings. If we look at even the lower end, the $120 million, that is twice the amount that was spent on ArriveCAN. This figure underscores the financial prudence of the ArriveCAN project, highlighting how technical innovation can lead to substantial savings in public expenditures, especially in a time of crisis. Lastly, on the topic of valuation, it is essential to differentiate between the cost of developing an app and its market value. If we consider an e-commerce application with 18 million users and 60 million transactions, facilitating billions of dollars in monetary transactions, I would ask any member of this House what its valuation would be.

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Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Feb/27/24 2:00:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, while it is still February, let me rise and wish everyone a happy Black History Month. This is the 62nd Black heritage moment from British Columbia, where I want to celebrate an extraordinary Canadian, a Black Canadian of mixed heritage. His mother was Black and his father was Scottish. Sir James Douglas is generally called “the father of British Columbia”, and he was the first governor. He stood down thousands of armed miners coming up from the United States who wanted to kill indigenous people and grab their land. This is known as the Fraser Canyon War, and it happened in 1858. He was without an army, but he made it clear to those armed thugs, who had already killed indigenous people and raped their women, that they were no longer in the wild west; they were in a new place where there was rule of law. They would have to have licences to look for gold and they would have to put down their guns. Thanks to Sir James Douglas, who fought for British Columbia and fought for justice.

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The Speaker

Feb/27/24 2:01:34 p.m.
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Happy Black History Month.

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Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)

Feb/27/24 2:01:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today I would like to urgently bring to members' attention a significant safety issue in civil aviation across the Taiwan Strait. This issue has arisen due to China's unilateral actions in changing the M503 southbound flight route on January 30, 2024. China has changed flight routes and revoked the 2015 cross-strait agreement without any consultation with Taiwan. Its actions seriously jeopardize safety, peace and stability in the region and undermine the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. The strait is vital to global trade, and any disruption would have a significant impact on the entire world. China's Civil Aviation Administration has been in clear breach of International Civil Aviation Organization regulations. It is crucial to ensure aviation safety standards and protect passenger safety. Now more than ever, it is important that we support global cohesion, the rule of law, and compliance with bilateral treaties.

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