SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Charlie Angus

  • Member of Parliament
  • NDP
  • Timmins—James Bay
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 63%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44

  • Government Page
  • 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 11:30:59 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was on the committee that looked into the spending. We looked at Baylis Medical. We looked at Palantir. We looked at WE Charity. We found no evidence on Baylis. There were certainly many questions about WE, but the question about the spending on ArriveCAN, to me, is a question of a lack of oversight. The $59 million could have been spent on 32 different contractors. Where was the accountability? Even in the midst of a pandemic, when we were trying to get money out the door to get tools that could help, this is an issue of a fundamental failure of oversight, and I think that is the question we need to focus on.
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