44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 8, 2024 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House today. Yesterday, common-sense Conservatives announced our demands for the upcoming federal budget.
We called on the government to axe the tax on farmers and food by immediately passing Bill C-234 in its original form. We called on the government to build the homes, not bureaucracy, by requiring cities to permit 15% more homebuilding each year as a condition for receiving federal infrastructure money. Finally, we called on the government to cap the spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. We said the government must find a dollar in savings for every new dollar of spending.
These were the three common-sense Conservative demands for the budget: axing the tax on farmers and food; building homes, not bureaucracies; and instituting a dollar-for-dollar rule. Of course, Conservatives in government would go further to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Under the NDP-Liberal government, we see how spending is completely out of control. Under the Prime Minister, Canada will spend $46.5 billion this year to service the debt. That is more than the federal health transfer. The government is spending more on servicing the debt than it does on the federal health transfer.
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- Apr/8/24 12:34:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member opposite was enthusiastic about hearing the rest of my speech, and I invite him to hear it now.
The Prime Minister is responsible for $46.5 billion this year in debt service costs. That is more than the federal government will transfer in health care. Astronomical amounts of money are being given to bankers and bond holders for the Prime Minister's out-of-control debt. The Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
Today, as the member pointed out, we are not debating the budget directly. We are discussing a question of privilege that relates centrally to government spending, to how the government spends taxpayers' dollars and the lack of controls associated with that spending. The point I want to emphasize is that this arrive scam scandal is intimately linked to overarching questions about how taxpayers' dollars are spent.
The government spent $60 million, according to the available data, on the arrive scam app, but that is a drop in a much larger ocean of contracting out to government insiders. The arrive scam scandal is illustrative of this larger problem of abuse, corruption, at best extremely generous contracting out, which has led to so much waste of taxpayers' dollars. The government will try to convince people that all of its spending is necessarily associated with meeting immediate needs that Canadians face, but that is very clearly not true.
We need to understand this picture of how government procurement is being abused under the NDP-Liberal government, how costly it is for taxpayers, and what an opportunity this presents for us to do better, to save money for taxpayers and focus, instead, on the core needs of our country.
Specifically on the arrive scam scandal, we had, according to the Auditor General's report, a rigged process. We had a process in which specifications were put in place that do not appear to make any logical sense but served the result of giving this one company, with only two people, the ability to access this contract. GC Strategies got the contract for the arrive scam app and subcontracted it. That company alone, according to estimates, got some $20 million. It did not do any work, other than a very sort of perfunctory activity of going to LinkedIn and finding others who might be able to perform the work.
A simple way of understanding what GC Strategies did and did not do would be if I were hired to paint your fence, Madam Speaker, for $100. I then hired the member for Winnipeg North and paid him $50 to paint the fence. He painted your fence and got $50. You paid me $100 and I just got $50 for facilitating the deal. Maybe I went on LinkedIn to find out that the member for Winnipeg North could paint fences.
He might be looking for job opportunities like this after the next election, so this may be a relevant example.
In that process, the middleman, the person who got the contract and passed it on, did not actually do anything. They did not add any value, yet they were able to collect, big time. The nature of this scandal was that GC Strategies, this so-called staff augmentation firm, which I think is the lingo that was used, took the contract, subcontracted the work out and got a whole bunch of money in the meantime for doing nothing.
The process that allowed GC Strategies to get this contract was a rigged process. In fact, the Auditor General revealed how GC Strategies, in one case, sat down with government officials and set the terms of the contract that they would then bid on.
We heard at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts over the break that KPMG was told to go through GC Strategies by government officials. They said that if KPMG wanted to be part of this work, then they had to go through GC Strategies. The government was aware of other companies that could do this work, yet they directed those companies to go through GC Strategies. There was clearly something of a special relationship whereby members of the NDP-Liberal government were keen to see GC Strategies cashing in big time, for reasons that remain somewhat unclear.
GC Strategies is also a company that doctored résumés they were submitting to the government. This is something that we should be teaching children not to do. It is not appropriate or ethical to be doctoring your résumé in order to access an opportunity that you would not otherwise qualify for. It appears that GC Strategies was doctoring résumés systematically.
During his earlier appearance at committee, Kristian Firth said they change the résumés to make them compliant with the requirements of the contract. Then they go back to their resource and ask if it is okay. If I am applying for a government contract, and I have five months of experience when I am supposed to have five years of experience, then GC Strategies would cross out “months” and write in “years.” Then they would send it back to me and say, “We made this little change. Is that okay?” Then they would send it off to the government afterward.
Kristian Firth admitted that this was not something that they did just once. Adjusting résumés to meet the requirements of the contract and then checking if that was okay before sending them in was their process. What a wild and broken system this was.
We have rigging of the process and systematic cheating, things that young children should know are highly unethical and that seem to have been happening systematically in the government. Despite these obvious problems with GC Strategies, the Liberal-NDP government was keen to push other companies to work through GC Strategies. Then we have obfuscation in committees and accusing people of lying. These are some of the particular issues around the arrive scam scandal.
Thinking about this in the context of the budget and the overall fiscal situation, we have been digging more on the arrive scam and asking what the procurement practices are that allow this sort of thing to happen. What is happening more broadly inside of the government that allowed $60 million to be spent in this case and for nobody to seem to notice or care?
First of all, this process of contracting to people to contract other people was not just a one-off. It was not something that happened just in the case of ArriveCAN. We found that there are 635 companies that do IT staff augmentation for the federal government. There are 635 companies whose job it is to receive contracts and then contract out.
I think there are cases where contracting out is likely legitimate, although I am very skeptical of the idea that there is any value in contracting out to those who subcontract and perhaps further subcontract after that. The general contractor project management function should be able to be performed inside of government, yet we have 635 companies that do IT staff augmentation only. They act as these middlemen, these middle companies that receive contracts and contract out.
There are 635 of them in the IT space alone. That is not just a one-off. That is not just the arrive scam app. This is a larger issue with how the government treats money overall. The larger issue is systematic growth in contracting out and contracting out to those who just do this “staff augmentation” piece. We have seen how, in the midst of dramatic growth in spending on the public service, there has also been dramatic growth in spending for contracting out.
The government was spending tens of billions of dollars in contracting out. Some of it was for management consulting, and we have talked about the enormous growth in spending on McKinsey, and some of it was for those who further contract out. We are spending more inside of government and we are also spending dramatically more outside of government. We would expect those things to be inversely related in that if we are spending more growing public service then we should be contracting out less, or maybe if we are contracting out more, that should correspond to having a smaller public service. However, the government is growing the size of the public service and contracting out more at the same time.
The NDP-Liberal government clearly has a profound lack of respect for taxpayer dollars. Then it will try say that the Conservatives want to fix the budget and that the money will come from cuts. However, when we look at how broken our contracting system is and when we look at the 635 companies doing staff augmentation in the IT space and the tens of billions of dollars being spent on contracting out, pretty clearly there is a lot of room to get the budget under control. We can stop giving money to those outside companies that are abusing the taxpayer and providing no value and we can instead provide tax relief to Canadians who need it. We can instead axe the tax, build homes and cap spending. We can get out budget under control if we fix these grotesque abuses in government spending.
One key aspect of this scandal we need to ask about is where the minister was in all of this. It is right and important that we demand answers from these contractors. Canadians elect members of Parliament from which emerge a cabinet and a government, an executive branch, that are supposed to be accountable for the decisions that the government makes. They are supposed to be providing oversight and policy direction. Of course, ministers are not involved in the minutiae of every decision, but they are responsible for the culture and the policy frameworks that are established.
I asked the minister of procurement what he was doing in the midst of this arrive scam scandal. Actually, there have been a number of different ministers. I think four ministers just in the period since the pandemic have been responsible for procurement. Therefore, there have been many hands that should have had an opportunity to impact this process, yet all of those ministers, and anybody who speaks from the government, would have us believe that they were just there, that something happened in the department that they were supposed to be in charge of, but that they had no accountability or responsibility for it. That is absurd.
Ministers should take responsibility for what happens in their departments. They should establish clear expectations in terms of accountability, ethics, respect for taxpayer dollars. When costly criminal corruption is occurring under the watch of a particular minister, then the minister should have some responsibility and some response to what she or he is doing in order to address those concerning events. However, when the current Minister of Public Services and Procurement was before committee, I asked him when he was briefed and what did he do. He said that he had received a briefing and that he provided no directive in terms of action in response to this scandal. That is unbelievable.
The descriptions by public servants are that ministers receive briefs, remain apprised of or seized with what is going on, but then ostensibly do nothing and have no role in actually shaping policy outcomes, which is just unacceptable. At best, the government has been a disinterested passenger in the midst of declining respect for taxpayer dollars. That is a an overly charitable description. The government has itself shown flagrant disregard for taxpayer dollars and has been complicit in various corruption scandals over the eight long years that it has been in power.
Even in its defence, the government says that the minister had nothing to do with it. We have someone in the government whose title is “Minister for Public Services and Procurement”, yet when there is one of the biggest procurement scandals in our country's history, the government says that we cannot expect the Minister of Procurement to have anything to do with a scandal in procurement. It is just in the name.
At committee, I proposed, and it elicited points of orders and maybe it will today, that we could replace the Minister of Public Services and Procurement with a potted plant and we would have the same result. A potted plant could receive briefings, naturally. A potted plant could be apprised of events, though it would obviously not take any action in response to those events.
Ministers were in the room, received briefings, but did nothing. They would want us to believe that the role as a minister of procurement is to simply be there, to hear things, to be interested in those things and to receive updates. Again, we could save a drop in the bucket in comparison to other money that could be saved, but we could at least save a minister's salary if we replaced the current procurement minister with some such inanimate object.
I want to underline that the arrive scam scandal, as bad as it is in and of itself, is a drop in this larger ocean of government waste and corruption. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on contracting out. There was clearly a basic incontinence associated with government spending. The money just flows out for no discernible reason. The processes are rigged. There is obfuscation and unresponsiveness at committee.
The latest is that we have seen how the indigenous procurement rules are being abused by insiders, insiders who feel they have no obligation to bring about any benefit to indigenous communities through their access to indigenous procurement. A lot more work needs to be done to understand the abuses of the indigenous procurement process that have been happening under the government. Very troubling information has come out, for instance, David Yeo saying that the point of the program is not to benefit indigenous communities, it is just to benefit him as an entrepreneur. I do not think that is the point of the policy.
We see costs, corruption and crime happening under the government. This privilege motion is one key piece of getting to the bottom of what happened, demanding answers from Kristian Firth that he was unwilling to give at committee. This would help us suss out, in detail, all the crime, corruption and the cost that we are seeing under the NDP-Liberal government.
Enough is enough. Canadians are looking for an alternative that will respect taxpayer dollars, that will restore probity in spending, that will bring it home.
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- Apr/8/24 12:54:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not aware of some of the long-tenured, historical events about which the member is speaking. I am a relatively young member of the House, so events before a certain date are before my time.
It is pretty rich for the Liberals, after eight years in power, to always want to draw our attention to things that happened in decades past. The fact of the matter is that since 2015, the national debt has more than doubled. More than half of our national debt is the responsibility of the Prime Minister. That is why we are now spending more on debt servicing than we transfer for health care. It is outrageous, out-of-control spending under the government. The $60 million for the arrive scam scandal is important, but it is part of a larger pattern of cost, crime and corruption. I mentioned some of these numbers in my speech, such as over 600 companies just doing staff augmentation. It is out of control.
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- Apr/8/24 12:58:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is hard to predict the timeline, but I have a great deal of hope about the critical steps that a Conservative government would take to fix the budget, and that includes establishing a dollar-for-dollar rule. This is common sense, that if a government is going to spend a dollar on something new, it should be able to explain where that dollar is coming from.
Those NDP-Liberal coalition partners are keen to announce all kinds of new spending initiatives, but they never explain where the money is going to come from. Clearly, in all of these new spending proposals, and, in many cases, I do not think they are serious about doing them, they promise new spending that will kick in at some distant point in the future. In every case, where the money is actually spent, it is digging us further into deep debt.
Beyond that, we have this flow of wasteful spending, the middle-man consultants, the management consultants who have done so well under the government.
If we instituted a dollar-for-dollar rule, this will get us back on track to understand that if we are going to spend a dollar on something, it has to come from somewhere.
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- Apr/8/24 2:13:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Financial Post headline says it all. Scotiabank reports that the Bank of Canada rate cuts could be delayed due to high government spending.
Under the Prime Minister, our national debt has more than doubled, more than all other prime ministers combined. The consequences are spiralling inflation and skyrocketing interest rates hitting every single Canadian family. Rents and mortgages have doubled. Food banks see record visits in the millions. Where is the Liberal government? It is MIA, missing in action.
This year alone, Canada will spend $46.5 billion just to service the growing debt. That is more than we spend on health care annually in the entire country.
After eight years of the NDP-Liberal government, common-sense Conservatives demand a dollar-for-dollar rule, for every new dollar spent, a dollar has to be found and saved. It is common sense. We need to stop the reckless overspending, stop inflation and stop punishing Canadian families. After all, this is how Canadian families balance their own budgets every single month,
Enough is enough. My constituents know that the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost, and after the next carbon tax election, we will finally have a Conservative government.
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- Apr/8/24 2:22:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while the common-sense Conservatives want to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
When it comes to inflation, after eight years, the Prime Minister is like a pyromaniac firefighter who is spraying gas instead of water on the inflationary fire. Does the Prime Minister realize that his billions of dollars in spending are putting the heat and the costs on taxpayers?
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- Apr/8/24 2:24:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we do have a common-sense Conservative plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime while the Prime Minister is not worth the cost after eight years.
On inflation, with all of his multi-billion dollar announcements, he is like the pyromaniac pretending to be a fireman, except the hose is spraying gas on the inflationary fire, rather than water. According to Scotiabank's chief economist, the inflationary deficits are driving up mortgage payments.
Does the Prime Minister not realize that all of his spending is putting the heat and the costs on our homeowners?
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- Apr/8/24 2:39:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the past week, we have seen nothing but photo ops.
It is worth reminding the minister that the current programs are being announced as if they are brand new, but they have been around since 2017. Since 2017, practically nothing has been done with these programs. Once again, the Liberals are resorting to photo ops in an effort to raise their profile, but it is not working. All we have seen for eight years is out-of-control spending.
Will the Prime Minister finally listen to the Governor of the Bank of Canada and stop his out-of-control spending, which is only driving up inflation and interest rates?
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- Apr/8/24 2:58:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians are clear on the two most important economic issues we face, inflation and high interest rates.
They understand that government deficits cause inflation. Runaway deficits cause runaway inflation. This year's deficit is expected to be $47 billion, $7 billion higher than forecast. To say this is a runaway is an understatement. The Bank of Canada's governor has been clear that deficits are the main factor keeping interest rates high.
Will the Prime Minister cap his runaway spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation?
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- Apr/8/24 2:59:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government is just throwing taxpayer money at a wall without any thought about execution, and it is making matters worse for Canadians.
It is a whack-a-mole approach to economic policy. Obviously, after eight years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians cannot afford the Prime Minister, his excess spending or his corruption.
Scotiabank says that rate cuts could be delayed by high government spending.
Next week, the Minister of Finance will table her budget. It is time for the deficits to stop. Will the minister commit to a dollar-for-dollar reduction in order to bring inflation and interest rates under control?
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Madam Speaker, as I begin my speech, I want to talk a bit about how Canadians cannot afford the higher taxes and inflation that the government has brought on, and they cannot afford the Prime Minister. That is why we have been calling for judicial use of taxpayer dollars. We have been calling for the government to axe the tax on farmers and food by immediately passing Bill C-234. We have demanded that the government build homes, not bureaucracy, by requiring cities to permit 15% more homebuilding each year as a condition of receiving federal funding. We have also asked the government to cap the spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down the interest rates and inflation. Conservatives said we will not support the government in its budget unless it does these things, so we will vote non-confidence if the government does not axe the tax; build more homes, not bureaucracy; and cap the spending.
It is the spending that brings us here today. We have seen that the ArriveCAN app, an app that could have cost only $80,000 to produce, ended up costing over $60 million. We have seen some unsavoury contractors taking advantage of the government, but the government also failed to maintain records.
This is a classic case of a time when we see a critical situation. Oftentimes this happens, and it is always very suspicious. There is a crime scene, a camera is recording the crime scene, but during the two minutes the crime happened, the camera seems to be mysteriously turned off, and then the camera comes back on after that. This is again one of these cases where we can smell that something is wrong and see that something is wrong.
We have the scathing Auditor General's report, which says that a massive amount of money was spent, and she cannot find what the money was spent on. She anticipates that 67% of the subcontractors did no actual work, yet here we are with a scandal of grand proportion. It appears that the tape was not running, that the camera was turned off for that period of time. The Auditor General says it could be as little as $60 million, and it could be far more.
We are debating a privilege motion here today. A privilege motion has to do with the ability of members of Parliament to do their jobs. Members of Parliament have particular privileges that are not broadly used by citizens. Taking a seat in the House of Commons is a privilege that only members of Parliament have, but the government has particular privileges as well. The government gets to write the cheques for Canada. It holds the chequebook. That is not an opposition party job. That is a job of the government. Therefore, it is incredibly important that the government maintains control of the chequebook and maintains the scrutiny of where the cheques are going. That is a massive failure, and we are trying to get to the bottom of that.
If we listen to the Liberals, they would have us believe that it is these evil contractors, and I am not denying that, who have been taking advantage of the government, which, by all accounts, appears to be the case, but where were the checks and balances? Where was the trust and verify? Why did it not ask if we were getting good value for money? This has been a common problem with the Liberals for a long time, that whenever they are questioned about a government failure, they point out how much money they have spent on a particular issue, whether it is border security, policing or managing vehicle crimes. They talk about how much money they are spending on a particular program, when the problem only seems to be getting worse.
Contractors have figured out that limiting the money being spent has not been an active priority for the government. Maintaining some sort of fiscal restraint is not something the government has been known for, and contractors have been taking advantage of that, for sure.
Common-sense Conservatives, after eight years of the Prime Minister, are putting forward a plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, and that is really what this comes down to.
We have heard some incredible things that have come out of committee. First is the fact that the Auditor General said that it was incredibly hard to track down what this money was spent on, as the contracts that GS Strategies got were more and more vague as time went on. They were for longer and longer periods of time and for larger and larger amounts of money. However, there have been some other interesting things, such as resumés that had been submitted to get the contracts being forged, which appears to be just straight-up fraud. There was a requirement for experience and qualifications, and GC Strategies admitted that it doctored these resumés to make sure that they fit in order to get the contracts.
The other really interesting thing that happened, which we discovered last week at committee, was that KPMG was approached by the government to do an audit of the effectiveness of the app, but rather than the government contracting KPMG directly to do this audit, the government employee suggested to KPMG that it should approach GC Strategies to do this audit rather than just doing it directly, even though it was the government that approached KPMG. There does seem to be something very interesting going on between the bureaucracy and GC Strategies.
Again, going back to this video camera that, for some apparent reason, seems to have been shut off just when the crime seemed to be happening, interestingly, all of the emails associated with this discussion of the KPMG contract have disappeared. The government employee who had been communicating on this deleted all of his emails and is no longer affiliated with the department that he worked with. I am not sure, but I think he has been suspended from the public service, so we do not have the documents.
Members might say, “Well, that's the actions of one individual” or “Mr. Firth is not answering our questions, and that's the actions of a particular individual”, but I would say that this has been the MO of the government. I remember back in 2015 when the Liberals came into power with the grand slogan of being “open by default”. That is what it said, yet we have seen more redactions, and we have seen the government take the Speaker of the House of Commons to court to prevent documents from coming to this place. We have seen endless amounts of redactions. We have an ATIP process that is completely dysfunctional. We will get an ATIP back, and it will be entirely blacked out. We have also seen the Prime Minister call an election to prevent the Winnipeg lab documents from coming to this place. He first sued the Speaker to prevent it, and then called an election to prevent the truth coming to light on a number of things.
It is not a far leap that, when citizens see the government refusing to answer questions and redacting or not allowing documents to come forth, citizens who are then called before Parliament would not treat Parliament with the respect that is required or would not be as forthright with Parliament as they should be, which is why we are calling on Mr. Firth to come to the bar so he can be questioned on a number of these issues. However, we also want to point out that we wish the government would be more forthright with documentation as well so we can get to the bottom of a number of these scandals.
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