44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 27, 2024 10:00AM
- Feb/27/24 11:46:23 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yes, we do agree because we want to get to the bottom of the matter.
A committee could look at everything that has been done with large companies, but the members would drown in the sea of hundreds of thousands of pages of contracts that we do not necessarily have the training to understand. We need to call for a public inquiry. We need outside people who are trained to do this kind of work to come in and get to the bottom of the story.
As I mentioned, and as my colleague said, ArriveCAN is just the tip of the iceberg. We do not know where taxpayers' money is going, and that is shameful.
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- Feb/27/24 12:00:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if I were to go back to Timmins—James Bay and say, “Hey, guess what, the Liberals screwed up again, and this time it is ArriveCan, so we are not going to go ahead with national dental care and we are not going to go ahead with pharmacare”, I would get laughed out of the room.
My focus is that we are going to force the government to deliver on things that are absolutely making it twist in the wind, thanks to a few percentage points over the Liberals in the polls right now, as they never would have come to the table on national pharmacare.
On these scandals, the Canadian public expects us to go beyond synthetic outrage to say, “What happened?” and “How was that money spent?”. As I said earlier, I was part of the investigation into Baylis Medical. I did not find anything that was problematic. If I had, I would have said so, but I did not. However, with the WE group we found major problems. We found major problems with ArriveCan. As my colleague, the member for Courtenay—Alberni, said, we need to scratch the surface on all contracting now, because there is an amazing amount of taxpayers' money that is being misspent through this process.
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- Feb/27/24 12:13:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I was going to say, what is embarrassing is that the Conservatives continue to protect their friends at Deloitte, including their former leadership candidate, Peter MacKay, and, just like the Liberals, they do not want to talk about it. They are both corporate-controlled parties.
They are trying to mislead us again. Those votes were about allocating $4.6 billion for COVID rapid tests and vaccines. They were about millions of dollars for a national child care program and funding for affordable homes and women's shelters.
It is no surprise that the Conservatives voted against those things, because that is what Conservatives do. They cut and gut the services people rely on.
We will not take any lessons from the Conservatives, who gave over $7 million in contracts to the former owners of GC Strategies. They also created the Phoenix disaster, which was supposed to save taxpayers $80 million but cost us $3.5 billion.
We have been fighting since the beginning to get to the bottom of the ArriveCAN scandal and to reduce the use of wealthy private consultants. We will not stop, and not just on ArriveCAN and not just on CBSA.
We need to look at the whole of government. We need an investigation into all of the outsourcing, something that is being blocked by the Conservatives, a Conservative-led committee, a Conservative chair who will not allow this motion to come back so that we can look at the whole picture. They do not want to look there.
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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 12:47:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, next the member is going to be blaming youth crime on individuals who were born during the Harper era. This is a Liberal scandal. Liberals have had eight years to reform and manage the public service as they saw fit.
Those questions need to be directed to the government. How was a company able to fleece taxpayers, under its watch, of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars? That is a question for you. If you cannot ask it, voters will get you out of the way.
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- Feb/27/24 12:51:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is up to the committee members. If my hon. colleague would like to urge his member to seek support to do that, it is something we can consider. Generally, our committee follows the reports from the Auditor General, so I would not decide this on my own. If the Auditor General studies it, we will take it up. Again, today is about ArriveCAN, a program that has not worked, as well as the support the NDP has given that program and the great waste to taxpayers.
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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 2:53:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague learned something today that has been known in the public domain for a number of weeks.
We have said from the beginning that the government's responsibility is to ensure that taxpayers' money is always managed well. In this case, the Auditor General identified a number of opportunities that needed to be investigated and where the government will follow all of the recommendations. If people have done something inappropriate with taxpayers' money, they will be held to account.
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- Feb/27/24 3:07:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, our government has said from the beginning that those who misused taxpayers' money will be held to account. Once the investigations that the CBSA, for example, ordered internally and the RCMP report is completed, if money was misappropriated, of course the government will take all the steps to recoup that money.
We have said from the beginning that anybody who mishandles taxpayers' money will face the consequences, and that is exactly what this government is doing.
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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 3:08:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, just because my hon. friend asserts something with manufactured indignation does not make it true. What we have said from the beginning is that we take the responsibility to manage taxpayers' money very seriously. That is why, when the border services agency identified irregularities, it began an internal investigation and referred the matter, as is appropriate, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Our government will always do what is necessary to hold everyone who may have misused taxpayers' money to account.
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- 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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- 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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