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House Hansard - 295

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 8, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 295 - Apr/8/24
Hon. Jonathan Wilkinson (Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Lib.)
  • Apr/8/24 2:59:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is important for a responsible government to address issues around affordability, address issues around environmental sustainability, invest in growing a clean economy and have a sound fiscal management strategy. We are doing all of those things. On the other side of the House, we have a Conservative Party of Canada that simply wants to cut and cut. It will cut affordable child care. It will cut dental care. It will cut the national school food program. It will cut the entire climate program. It will actually cut investments in growing a clean economy for the future. My goodness, it is such an irresponsible position that these folks are taking—
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Context: House Hansard - 295 - Apr/8/24
Mr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC)
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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