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House Hansard - 305

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 30, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 305 - Apr/30/24
Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)
  • Apr/30/24 6:57:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have seen a consistent pattern of corruption from the government, that is, of trying to get contracts to well-connected government insiders. The government has quite the choice of friends, by the way. At the government operations committee, we have been studying the favouritism that the government has shown toward McKinsey. The government's contracting watchdog has come up with a damning report about that favouritism, about how rules were changed and structured to work to the advantage of McKinsey. That is in the context where we know about the friendship between the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and Dominic Barton, who was the managing partner of McKinsey at the time. To be fair, Dominic Barton went to the committee and said he was not a friend of the Prime Minister, that he barely knew him. If Dominic Barton's testimony is to be believed, then the government funnels contracts not only to its friends but also to people it wishes were its friends. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister talked lot in fact about this and made lots of claims about how there is a friendship. Rather than delve too far into the extent to which they are friends or not, we know that the government had a passionate, perhaps unrequited, love for McKinsey and did everything it could to send contracts McKinsey's way. In particular I am following up on a question about the arrive scam scandal, about how we know now that systems were created and designed to maximize the benefit for GC Strategies, as well as Dalian, and that contracts were sent to those companies. The Auditor General reported that members of the government actually sat down with people at GC Strategies, who advised the government on what it should be asking for in a contracting request. GC Strategies subsequently got the contract. The government was rigging the process with the bidder that eventually got the contract, whether it was McKinsey or Dalian, the principal of which was a government employee at the same time as he was getting government contracts. There are multiple instances of corruption, of the NDP-Liberal government's working to get contracts to its well-connected insider friends. It is a government that is working for insiders and not for Canadians. In that context, we have seen incredible growth in spending on contracting. While the public service has been growing in size, the government has also been spending more than ever on outside contracting. Then when we talk about having problems with the budget deficit, the Liberals come back to ask what could possibly be cut or where savings could possibly be found. Let us cut back on the spending on outside consultants. Let us stop shovelling money to McKinsey. Let us stop shovelling money to GC Strategies. Let us stop paying useless insiders who simply receive contracts and pass on the work, or who are paid to provide advice that the public service is perfectly competent to provide. It is the well-connected NDP-Liberal friends and consultants who have gotten incredibly rich under the government. GC Strategies' founders became millionaires on arrive scam alone. Let us cut out the spending on well-connected NDP-Liberal insiders and provide those savings to the budget. I asked this before and will ask it again: Was the scheme to reward well-connected insiders due to incompetence on the part of the government or to outright corruption?
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