- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, the member opposite, in her speech, spoke a little about following rules, the rule of law and so forth.
I think that it has been interesting over the last few months. We have seen the incredible disregard that this government has for our institutions and for adherence to rules. We had the court rule, for example, that the government's imposition of the Emergencies Act was unlawful. We have seen, even today, how institutions are undermined when we have people in positions of authority, such as the Speaker, making outrageous rulings without any basis or precedent.
Can the member explain why her government and its partners in various positions consistently ignore precedent, ignore rules, ignore the law and think that they are somehow above the rules?
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- Jan/30/23 6:48:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, here are the facts. The Prime Minister has more than doubled the national debt in his eight years in office. The Prime Minister has run up more debt in these eight years than all of the previous prime ministers had up until that point. That is the reality of the legacy of the Prime Minister. That is causing inflation. It is causing Canadians to suffer. Of course, some other countries have pursued similar kinds of policies and they are experiencing the same challenges as a result. However, there is a better way. That is to control spending and focus on what is truly important to Canadians.
Much of the growth in spending we have seen, as I talked about, has been to outside consultants. We have dramatic growth in the core public service but, at the same time, we have a government contracting out to consulting firms like McKinsey that it is personally close with for services that are supposed to be done in the core public service. That is driving inflation and driving paying Canadians' experience.
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- May/18/23 6:46:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for speaking from the heart tonight. However, in all seriousness, the words he read had nothing whatsoever to do with the question I asked, which is not entirely unusual from the current government but is particularly obvious in the case of what has just transpired. These things used to annoy me. Now, I think we just have to laugh at the absurdity of the exercise. I will give the member another chance, I suppose.
My question was this: Does he believe that McKinsey is an ethical company? If it is not ethical, should the integrity regime be reformed to ensure that companies that are responsible for fuelling the opioid crisis and that are being sued, finally, by the government for that, should not also be accessing massive amounts of government procurement? Is it an ethical company? Should the integrity regime be reformed?
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- May/18/23 6:38:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am following up on a simple question that I asked the government earlier, which was whether it believes that McKinsey is an ethical company. We have not gotten a direct answer from the government on that, and I do not think it is a difficult question at all for reasons that I will explain later.
Does the government think McKinsey is an ethical company? I ask the Government of Canada whether it thinks this private company is ethical because the number of contracts to McKinsey have gone up dramatically under the tenure of the government. McKinsey has received over $100 million in contracts from the government during the time the Prime Minister was in office, and this has happened in the context of various close relationships that existed: Dominic Barton, the global managing partner of McKinsey, advising the Prime Minister's growth council and recommending the creation of the Canada Infrastructure Bank; many McKinsey people going to work for the Infrastructure Bank; and McKinsey analysts doing so-called pro bono work for the growth council that therefore allowed McKinsey to infiltrate government and then get all these contracts.
There is a long-running close relationship between the government and McKinsey that led to McKinsey getting over $100 million in contracts, and the government has since revealed that not all rules were consistently followed, in fact, in the awarding of contracts to McKinsey. There was a failure to follow the rules, there were clearly strategic efforts by McKinsey to integrate itself into the operations of government and there were people from McKinsey who were given prominent positions within government, like Dominic Barton, head of the Prime Minister's growth council and, subsequently, ambassador to China. While he was ambassador to China, although he no longer worked for McKinsey, McKinsey was involved in facilitating a meeting with the Infrastructure Bank that he attended. There were all of these suspicious interactions or integrations between the government and McKinsey.
It is important to then ask this question: What is this company that has exercised such outsized influence over the direction of our country?
I am asking this question today in the context where we just had an opposition day motion debated on the opioid crisis. We have this horrific opioid crisis in this country, and part of the reason we have an opioid crisis is that Purdue Pharma, working with McKinsey, fuelled that crisis. McKinsey gave Purdue Pharma advice on how to supercharge opioid sales, recommending things like paying bonuses to pharmacists in cases where there were overdoses and having online pharmacies that would circumvent the checks on addiction that traditional pharmacies put in place. These were the kinds of things that McKinsey recommended, and McKinsey has had to pay out significantly for it. It reached a settlement of over half a billion dollars in the United States.
In the United States, McKinsey is being held accountable and being forced to pay compensation to victims of the opioid crisis. In fact, Republicans and Democrats, in equal measure across various states, have pursued McKinsey for this. However, in Canada, the Liberal government has a close relationship with McKinsey and has given it over $100 million in contracts.
We have found out lately that the government is joining British Columbia's class action lawsuit against McKinsey over its role in the opioid crisis. In response to significant opposition pressure from members saying that these bad actors need to be held accountable, the government is finally saying it is going to take a step in that direction and join this lawsuit. However, it still has not been willing to say it is going to reform the integrity regime so that McKinsey does not get contracts in the future. What sense does it make for the government to continue to pour out largesse on McKinsey, hiring it for contracts of dubious value and spending over $100 million of taxpayers' money in the process, but it will not answer the simple question of whether it thinks McKinsey is ethical?
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- Apr/18/23 6:53:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, here are the facts. The government broke the rules in the awarding of contracts to McKinsey. It admitted it broke the rules. It put it in a Treasury Board press release that it put out on the Friday of President Biden's visit. It admitted it broke the rules, albeit in a way that was specifically designed to avoid public notice. That is why we need to have the ministers back to committee to question them about exactly why the rules were not followed.
We hear bluster from the member across the way, saying, “These opposition politicians, they're always criticizing us. They're always engaging in personal attacks. Why are those members of the opposition criticizing the government?” This is a case where his own government admitted it flagrantly disregarded the rules that were in place, so of course it is the job of the opposition to criticize the government in cases where it especially has admitted breaking the rules. Why—
An hon. member: Oh, oh!
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- Apr/18/23 6:45:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, members will be familiar with the over $100 million in contracts the government gave to its friends at McKinsey. The government said, though, not to worry, as all the rules were followed. It just so happened, it said, that as it followed all the rules, those contracts ended up getting awarded to McKinsey.
We see massive increases in spending on the public service, as well as massive increases in spending on contracting out of public services. In other words, we have more public servants and we are contracting more work out of the public service at the same time. When Dominic Barton, a friend of the Prime Minister, was leading McKinsey, we started to see this increase, and the increase has continued. It is a significant increase in contracting out, specifically contracting out to McKinsey.
What was the government's response? It said those were independent decisions, the rules were followed and Dominic Barton is not really the Prime Minister's friend anyway. Actually, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have spoken previously about the significant close access they had to Dominic Barton and about that being a key factor in their decision to appoint him as ambassador to China. In their dealings with this shady company, they said all the rules were followed, until they said the rules were not followed. This is new.
Members might not have heard that, because they quietly released a press release on the day President Biden was here. Everyone was talking about President Biden's visit and they thought it was a great opportunity to release a press release quietly on a Friday in the middle of Biden's visit. They said they were actually misleading the public the whole time and that, actually, the Treasury Board rules were not followed. I will quote the press release. It says, “However, there are indications that certain administrative requirements and procedures were not consistently followed.”
In other words, in response to my question and various other questions, the government House leader had been saying that the rules were followed in the awarding of these contracts and that we can rest assured that more than $100 million was given in contracts to McKinsey in accordance with Treasury Board rules. Now the government has revealed that the rules were not followed.
We are left with this question: Why is it that the government gave over $100 million in contracts to its friends at McKinsey, a company that has been implicated in causing the opioid crisis and had to pay over half a billion dollars in compensation for causing the opioid crisis in the United States, a company that did a report for the Saudi government, which enabled it to identify and target dissidents who were active on social media, and a company that has been involved with corrupt officials all over the world and has worked closely with sanctioned entities in Russia and with state-owned and affiliated entities in China?.
Why did the government give over $100 million in contracts, and why did it break the rules in the awarding of these contracts in the process? Why were its clear administrative requirements and procedures not consistently followed?
Will the government apologize? Will it apologize for having misled the House for weeks about whether the Treasury Board rules were followed, and will it come clean about why it broke the rules in awarding these contracts to this company with a terrible global reputation?
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Madam Speaker, I do not doubt the member's sincere personal feelings, but I have to say that the government has failed the people of Afghanistan for far too long.
If we reflect on the timelines, the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021. The Afghanistan standing committee report that the member referred to came out in June 2022. It has been nine months since then, and now we are debating this legislation at the end of March 2023. The foreign affairs committee unanimously passed a motion I put forward in the fall of last year reiterating the call from the Afghanistan committee, and passed a similar motion this spring.
This legislation, once passed, does not grant the exemptions yet. We will still have to wait for exemptions to be granted by the government through regulation. We have already been through two winters in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the very dire situations the member spoke about have persisted throughout that time. However, the government has been very late in responding to unanimous calls, and certainly calls from the opposition, for action. Why has it taken the government so long?
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- Mar/21/23 6:58:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on the all-important question of whether the Prime Minister and Dominic Barton ever worked out together, I think this is a bit of an exercise in absurdity.
What we know, factually, is that Dominic Barton has basically told the committee, “This Prime Minister guy, we are not friends. We barely know each other. I did not recognize him in an elevator once.” The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have said precisely the opposite over and over again.
In fact, there are various clips I have shared, and others have shared, where the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have spoken very specifically about how accessible Dominic Barton is and about how they have a connection. In fact, to the issue of who has whose phone number, the Deputy Prime Minister said, at the time that Dominic Barton was appointed ambassador, that we need an ambassador who can call the Prime Minister at any time on the phone. This is a connection that Dominic Barton has with the Prime Minister that has been built up over time.
Who is telling the truth, the government or Dominic Barton? It is clear that there is a cushy relationship, that McKinsey has, through “pro bono” work, sought to integrate itself into government and use that integration to push its business forward. That is the problem. Over $100 million of contracts have come out of this close integration of relationships and it needs to be scrutinized.
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- Mar/21/23 6:50:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the government's relationship with McKinsey in a follow-up to a question I had asked. This has been an important issue for me and an important issue for the opposition.
Why is it important? Well, there are a number of reasons. First, the government has spent over $100 million on contracts for McKinsey, work that public servants have told the media that, in many cases, could have been done inside the public service.
More broadly, we are seeing a significant increase in spending on outside consultants by the government at the same time as we are seeing growth in the public service. The government is spending more inside the public service, and it is spending more to contract out activities as well, so there is a basic fiscal probity question at play here, but there are also some other issues that I think are very important as we look at the government's relationship with McKinsey.
One is that Dominic Barton, the managing partner of McKinsey, was leading the Prime Minister's growth council, having special access through that growth council to ministers and the government at the same time that McKinsey was pitching services for sale to the government. We know from emails that a Mr. Pickersgill, who was working for McKinsey, was supplying analysts for the growth council at the same time as he was sending emails to the government requesting work. We have seen those emails, so, very clearly, there are questions of conflict of interest.
There are other issues of conflict of interest. The fact that the Minister of Defence, yesterday, at the operations committee, was asked if it is acceptable for McKinsey to do work for the Canadian Department of Defence at the same time as it is potentially working for other departments of defence for hostile actors around the world and learning things from our Department of Defence that it may be using in those other interactions.
The Minister of National Defence did not know, or was not willing or able to tell the committee, which other departments of defence around the world McKinsey was working for, but we were told by the deputy minister not to worry because the information and the issues that McKinsey are working on are not that secret. Really, they are just talking about operational structural details, which it is not getting access to national security. They are just operational aspects of the work of government and so forth.
On the other hand, the minister was unwilling to provide basic information about these contracts to the committee unredacted. What we heard from the Minister of National Defence and her department was effectively that the information is not so secret that we need to worry about what McKinsey may be learning and using in its engagements with other hostile powers, but at the same time, the information is so secret that it could not even be shared with members of a parliamentary committee, despite the order to produce that content.
A final issue I will raise tonight is the fact that McKinsey worked for Purdue Pharma and gave them advice specifically on how to supercharge opioid sales. That is not an issue of something happening beyond our borders. The opioid crisis has affected so many Canadians. I think that every family has, in some way, been touched by the opioid crisis.
McKinsey specifically advised Purdue Pharma on how to turbocharge its sales engine. That advice included, for instance, how to circumvent traditional pharmacies by operating mail-in pharmacies to circumvent the controls that were being put in place in traditional pharmacies. That advice included paying bonuses for overdoses that occurred. This was advice that McKinsey provided to Purdue Pharma at the same time that McKinsey was working for the Government of Canada, and at the same time that Dominic Barton was leading McKinsey and leading the Prime Minister's growth council.
Why is the government willing to do business with McKinsey? Why is it comfortable with the risks this poses in fundamental ethics, the opioid crisis issues, as well as the conflict of interest issues?
We have repeatedly raised the broader question of all the money that is being spent on these outside consultants. The government's relation with McKinsey stinks, and it needs to be addressed.
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- Feb/13/23 2:56:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal Prime Minister, Canadians are struggling, but their Liberal friends at McKinsey have never had it so good.
McKinsey worked for ICE in the United States, where it advised the Trump administration to cut food and medical supplies for immigrant detainees. These are the same people that the Liberals then turned to for advice on immigration, even when the public service said that it could do the work itself.
Will the Prime Minister take responsibility for bringing McKinsey into our immigration system, or will he step aside so we can fix what he broke?
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- Feb/9/23 3:02:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister across the way would have us believe that this gross largesse for McKinsey is somehow about helping families. Let me assure the member opposite that there will be austerity for McKinsey when the Conservatives take office, and there will be support available for Canadians.
Yesterday, the President of the Treasury Board could not answer my question about whether or not McKinsey is an ethical company. This should not be a difficult question given the record. Can any minister in the government answer this simple question: Does the government believe that McKinsey is an ethical company, yes or no?
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- Feb/6/23 3:30:09 p.m.
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I rise today to speak to the House about the ongoing Liberal-McKinsey scandal. This is the affair through which the government gave over $100 million in contracts to its friends at McKinsey & Company.
The Liberals' response to this scandal has been to say not to not worry, that they will have the ministers responsible for the Treasury Board and procurement investigate what happened in the context of Treasury Board and procurement. In other words, they are not only having Liberals investigate Liberals, but precisely having the Liberal cabinet ministers responsible for this issue in the first place investigating themselves.
The Prime Minister thinks that an appropriate response to waste and corruption within his own government is to have the ministers responsible for that waste and corruption investigating themselves. The Conservatives do not think that is an appropriate response to scandal, and that is why we are moving this motion today to call for an independent investigation by Canada's non-partisan Auditor General.
Of course, we have seen in the House the Auditor General attacked by the Minister of National Revenue. The Conservatives have faith in our independent officers of Parliament, and that is why we want to bring in the Auditor General and ask her to investigate the waste and corruption we are seeing under the Liberal government.
The Liberal-McKinsey affair has three main elements to it. We can speak about corruption, about control and about character.
The Liberals have given over $100 million that we know of so far in contracts to McKinsey & Company. At the same time as McKinsey was selling its services to the Liberal government, Dominic Barton, who was the managing partner of McKinsey, was leading the Prime Minister's own growth council. Although Dominic Barton has said that he is not friends with the Prime Minister, that he barely knows these people and that he did not recognize the Prime Minister in an elevator the first time he saw him, we have the Deputy Prime Minister talking about how close Dominic Barton was to the Prime Minister, how accessible he was and how they had a relationship of being able to contact each other any time, which was build up over time.
On the word of the Deputy Prime Minister, there is a close relationship between the managing director of McKinsey at the time and the Prime Minister. Analysts at McKinsey are doing analytical work for the Prime Minister's growth council at the same time as McKinsey is selling its consulting services to the government. It is no surprise under those circumstances, when we have these clear conflicts of interest and close relationships, that there was a significant spike with respect to the volume of contracts McKinsey was getting from the government. We have conflicts of interest driven by these relationships.
Let us talk as well about control, because Canadians are asking who is pulling the strings, who is making the decisions and who is really deciding the direction of the government. What has been happening with the government is that it has been bringing in high-priced outside consultants, who have been both selling to the government and also making very significant policy decisions. They have been doing work that the public service has said it could be doing itself. We do not know what these consultants are doing, but the consultants are playing a very significant role in setting policy and direction, and they are not subject to the same kinds of transparency requirements as the public service.
If Canadians want to know what discussions were happening within the public service, they can use the transparency and accountability tools that are available to them. However, if Canadians want to know about decisions that are made at McKinsey that are in fact shaping what happens in government, they are not able to access that information. In fact, up until now, McKinsey has not even been willing to provide its client list and that is a huge problem, because McKinsey has a history of working on both sides of the same issue.
In the United States, we had instances where McKinsey was working for the FDA, which is responsible for approving drugs, and it was working for pharmaceutical companies at the same time. It is working for the approval body as well as for the companies that are seeking that approval. In fact, the New York Times revealed instances where the same individual was working for both the FDA and those making the applications.
Is that same thing happening in Canada? Do we have decisions being made by McKinsey while it is also working for clients who benefit from those decisions? The reality is that we do not know, because McKinsey will not disclose its client list. Therefore, there is a lack of transparency and there is influence and control coming from these high-priced consultants who are being hired by the government.
Therefore, there are issues of corruption and control. However, there are also issues of character.
Who is this company? Who is McKinsey, and what has it done around the world? Most notably for the impact it is having here in Canada, McKinsey worked for Purdue Pharma. This is the company that invented OxyContin and was responsible for driving the opioid crisis that has devastated our communities.
In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to criminal misbranding of its products and downplaying the addiction risk to market these opioids to people. It did this so that it could make money with total disregard for the suffering caused. After 2007, McKinsey continued to work for Purdue Pharma even though it had pleaded guilty. McKinsey put together proposals with a number of recommendations aimed at helping Purdue Pharma supercharge its opioid sales.
Those recommendations included, incredibly, paying bonuses to pharmacists in instances of overdose deaths. In cases where traditional pharmacies were trying to put in place mechanisms to prevent over-prescription, McKinsey proposed that one could have a mail-in process for people to order opioids without needing to go to traditional pharmacies, allowing them to circumvent the checks that existed.
McKinsey was doing this kind of work for Purdue with no regard for basic ethical or moral norms. That was when Dominic Barton was leading McKinsey. I asked him about this at committee last week, and Mr. Barton said he had no idea that McKinsey was doing this work for Purdue. It was a client for 10 years, and the managing director claimed he had no idea.
McKinsey has done other work around the world. It has worked with Russian state-owned and affiliated companies. It has worked with a Chinese state-affiliated company that is building militarized islands in the South China Sea.
These points speak to the character of this company. If we want to talk about conflict of interest, we have a company that is doing work for the Department of National Defence here in Canada while working with Russian and Chinese state-owned and state-affiliated companies.
McKinsey did a report for the Saudi government in which it identified influential dissidents who were driving criticism of Saudi economic policy. Not surprisingly, after those accounts were identified, these dissidents were subject to various forms of harassment. One of them actually lives in Canada and was subject to harassment on Canadian soil.
We have corruption. We have conflict of interest. We have control. We have a lack of character from this company. This is the company that the Prime Minister keeps. This is the company that has gotten over $100 million in contracts.
While Canadians are suffering, well-connected Liberal insiders have never had it so good, especially the well-connected Liberal insiders at McKinsey.
In the context of this scandal, the government's response is that it is going to have the cabinet ministers responsible for procurement and for the Treasury Board do their own investigation. That is clearly not good enough.
The Liberals have made a complete mess of governance. They are wasting taxpayers' dollars and giving money to their friends. The public service is growing, and they are giving more and more money to outside consultants. We cannot trust the Liberals, who are responsible for these scandals, to then come in and say that they are going to investigate themselves.
That is why, as an urgent matter, it is time to ask the Auditor General to come in and get to the bottom of what happened here. We need the resources and the ingenuity of the Auditor General to find out what is happening and assess value for money.
There are many different aspects to this scandal. Canadians need to decide, at a basic character level, if this is the kind of company that they want to see their prime minister doing business with. The Auditor General is well positioned to assess value for money, to say, “What did we actually get for this $100 million-plus?”
How much money was actually spent, by the way? We cannot get a straight answer from the government on this. Moreover, was there value for money? Many public servants have told the media that they do not know what work was done. They brought in PowerPoint slides and said that they were going to change everything, but nothing got done.
It is time to bring in the Auditor General. Conservatives want this motion adopted so that the Auditor General will help all of us get to the bottom of what happened between the Liberals and McKinsey.
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I had a slogan suggestion for his leadership campaign as well. It was “Get high in the polls”, but anyway, I will carry on with my remarks here. I wish my friend well, but I will not be supporting his bill.
This bill is about a review of our pandemic preparedness and comes out of the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, it is sort of cliche to say but it is obvious, is the seminal event in all of our lives that has had so many dramatic consequences. There are the health consequences for so many people, but also the social and cultural consequences of the pandemic that have deeply shaped us and will continue to shape us. Most of those consequences, quite frankly, are negative and require a reaction to the social and cultural damage that has been wrought as a result of the divisions that have been created through this pandemic, some of them maybe just incidental or unintended, but some of them very much intentionally sown.
It is right that we, as politicians, as leaders but also as a society in general, should be evaluating and reviewing the effects of the pandemic and asking what happened here, how we got some things so badly wrong, what were the things that we got right, and how we could approach future pandemics in a better way. In principle, I agree with the idea of having a postpandemic review and having in place provisions to ensure that there is a plan for future pandemics. I do not regard this bill, sadly, as a serious approach to those things.
I will just mention some aspects of this. One is that Liberals love to put forward new advisory councils appointed by government ministers. We saw this with their child care bill, Bill C-35. We are seeing this again with Bill C-293, where they are saying they have this issue they have to think about and therefore they are going to have an advisory council that is going to be responsible for advising the government about it. The minister responsible for that area is going to appoint the advisory council. By the way, the advisory council should be, in certain respects, diverse, reflective of different kinds of backgrounds, experiences and so forth.
However, what guarantees diversity of thought in an advisory mechanism is diversity in the appointment process, that is, bringing in multiple voices in determining who are the right people to sit on this advisory council. If a minister chooses who sits on the advisory council, then obviously they are going to be tempted to appoint people who share their pre-existing philosophy and who are not necessarily going to dig into providing the kind of criticism that is required of the government's approach.
Various members have put forward proposals in terms of the kind of broad-based, genuinely democratic postpandemic review that we would need to have. Many of those conversations are already going on. There should be a mechanism within the government to have this kind of review. I know various provinces are looking at this already. There should be international mechanisms around pandemic review. All these things are important, but those review processes should not be a top-down, controlled whitewash. They should be authentically empowered to hold governments accountable, to ask whether we got some big things wrong in the context of the pandemic, why we got them wrong, and how we could ensure we fix those issues.
In the time I have left, let me highlight some of the things I think we got badly wrong about the pandemic, and some of the ways we need to think about how we go forward.
There were a lot of things that we did not know about COVID-19 when it started. Let us acknowledge that it was probably inevitable that we were going to get some things wrong, but at a basic level we should have had the stockpile of PPE that was required. This was coming out of past pandemics, so that people could eventually come to conclusions such as to what degree certain kinds of masks limit, or not, the spread of the virus. At the very beginning, before we knew anything, it would have been a good kind of default to say, let us make sure that we have protective equipment in place and that we have that stockpile available so that it could be available to people.
It was out of the discussion after the SARS pandemic a couple of decades ago that we created the Public Health Agency, which was supposed to help us be prepared for these things. We were not prepared. We did not have the stockpiles of PPE. In fact, we sent away PPE at a critical juncture early in the pandemic. There was a lack of preparedness, particularly around having the equipment that was required.
Members will recall, and it is important to recall, that the leading public health authorities in this country and in the U.S. said not to use masks and that masks are ineffective or even counterproductive. That was the message at the beginning. Likely, part of the reason that message was pushed, in a context where doctors and nurses were using that equipment but the general public was told not to use these things because they are counterproductive, was that there was a shortage of supply. The government could have been more honest about acknowledging the fact that there was a shortage of supply and that it had failed to plan and prepare for that reality.
This speaks to another point. There is the lack of preparedness in terms of having the PPE available, but also we would have been much better off if governments and public health authorities had been more willing to openly acknowledge the things they did not know. I think early discussions around masking were a good example of the tone we had. People were told that if they were for masking when they were supposed to be against masking, they were anti-science and they were pushing an anti-science message. Later, there was the revision, in terms of the government's messaging.
Our public health authorities and governments could have shown a greater degree of humility right at the beginning of the pandemic and said that there were just things they did not know and that masking was a reasonable precautionary measure. However, it was a very assertive approach that carried itself throughout the pandemic with respect to any diversity of opinion in terms of pandemic strategy. If people were disagreeing with the prevailing consensus, then they were supposedly anti-science. As members have pointed out, the way science progresses is through some degree of open debate and challenging presumptions. The reality is that public health bodies and governments were expressing certainty about things that they were less than certain about.
Let us acknowledge that throughout the pandemic there were various revisions. I recall, for example, that when vaccines first came out the government's message was to take the first available vaccine. Then the government said not to take AstraZeneca and recommended Pfizer or Moderna but not AstraZeneca. At the same time as the government was not recommending AstraZeneca for Canadians, I had constituents who did what the government told them to do with the first shot, and now it was telling them that they were supposed to have a second shot of a different kind, which was apparently totally fine in Canada, whereas other countries were saying that people needed to have two doses of the same kind. I understand that as the science is unfolding there are going to be things we do not know, but if the government had been willing to acknowledge in a more honest, transparent way throughout that process that there were some things we did not know, we would have been much better off.
I want to conclude by saying that I am very concerned about some of the social and cultural impacts of this pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, we were already seeing trends where there was sort of a breaking down of traditional community and a greater political polarization. People were less likely to be involved in neighbourhood and community organizations, community leagues, faith organizations and these kinds of things and were becoming more polarized along political lines. Those existing trends were dramatically accelerated through the pandemic, where the restrictions made it difficult for people to gather together in the kind of traditional community structures that had existed previously, and we have seen a heightened political polarization, with people being divided on the basis of their views on masks and their vaccination status.
As we evaluate what happened in the pandemic, and this is more of a cultural work than a political work, we need to think about how we can bring our communities back together, reconcile people across these kinds of divides and try to rebuild the kinds of communities we had previously, where people put politics aside and were willing to get together and focus on what united them.
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- Jan/31/23 2:45:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we continue to hear complete non-responses from the government.
The Globe and Mail has reported that federal government contracts accounted for 10% of McKinsey gross revenues. I think McKinsey puts the gross into gross revenue. When Dominic Barton led McKinsey, they developed a plan to supercharge the opioid crisis that included rewarding pharmacists for overdose deaths. That is despicable.
Why did the Prime Minister funnel over $100 million into this disgusting company?
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- Jan/31/23 2:44:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is one more sleep until the Prime Minister's good friend Dominic Barton appears before the government operations committee.
The Prime Minister has called Dominic Barton an “exceptional individual”. Dominic Barton's company fuelled the opioid crisis, advised Saudi autocrats on dissident crackdowns and helped Chinese state-owned companies build militarized islands in the South China Sea.
Yes, Dominic Barton certainly is “exceptional”, but why does the Prime Minister do so much for his ethically deficient friends and so little for struggling Canadians?
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- Jan/31/23 10:13:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have a number of petitions I want to present to the House today.
The first petition deals with the ongoing national unity crisis. It is a particular concern for my constituents in Alberta. The petitioners note that the government, through rhetoric, policy, action and inaction, has caused a national unity crisis. They call on the government to take responsibility for the national unity crisis it has created and, as one important remedial measure, to ensure there are no bureaucratic or legislative roadblocks for provinces that wish to exercise their constitutionally allowed measures of autonomy.
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- Jan/30/23 6:40:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the course of the parliamentary break, we have all had an opportunity to talk to people in our communities and across the country, and it is clear that, after eight years of the Prime Minister's economic and social policies, many people are hurting. There are many people who are struggling in various ways, especially under the profound weight of inflation, and they are asking for all of us to look for solutions that empower them to have jobs and opportunity, and to see their tax dollars respected.
At the same time, we are seeing continuing outrageous extravagance in spending from this government. While Canadians are struggling, the government has been spending so much more, not on helping Canadians, but on things that serve the government's interest, and enrich and empower its friends.
I am asking a follow-up tonight on a question I asked earlier about spending $6,000 a night for a single hotel room. The government spent $6,000 a night on a single hotel room. We asked who stayed in that hotel room. There was some implication that it was the Prime Minister, but we do not know that for sure.
I also mentioned in my question the $54 million spent on the development of an app, the ArriveCAN app, which did not work very well and did more to impede Canadians in their travel than actually facilitate the effective prevention of the transmission of COVID. In any event, if that was the piece of technology the situation called for, which I do not think it was, but if it was, it could have been developed much more quickly at a much lower price and probably be much more effective.
However, we are seeing this trend in outrageous government spending on friends of the government, on external contractors, at a time when Canadians are suffering, which was the question I had asked earlier.
Today, of course, what is big in the news is the fact that the government spent over $100 million in outsourced contracts to McKinsey and Company. I would remind members that McKinsey is managed by Dominic Barton, a close friend of the Prime Minister, and someone who is simultaneously chairing the Prime Minister's economic growth council.
Effectively, Dominic Barton, as the head of McKinsey, is both an adviser to the government and a vendor for the government. With great fanfare, the Prime Minister said that he was only paid a dollar a year for his position leading the economic growth council. Only a dollar a year, but meanwhile we have over $100 million in outsourced contracts over the life of this government so far to McKinsey. We asked today what the exact amount of it was. The government would not provide that number, and it keeps going up every time.
After eight years of this Prime Minister, Canadians are struggling economically. They are struggling under the weight of inflation, which the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the former Governor of the Bank of Canada all say is domestically caused. They are struggling under the weight of those policies. Meanwhile, we are seeing outrageous profligate spending on contracts to friends of the government going out to the McKinsey, $54 million for the ArriveCAN app and $6,000 a night for a hotel room.
Therefore, I want to ask the parliamentary secretary this: How does he and other members of the government face their constituents, who are facing these challenges, and justify this kind of outrageous, unaccountable, nonsensical spending?
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- Jan/30/23 2:49:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, perhaps I can assist the minister in getting to the bottom of the circumstances around these contracts.
The Prime Minister is a very close personal friend of Dominic Barton, who is the managing partner of McKinsey. Under Dominic Barton, McKinsey monitored dissident social media accounts for the Saudi government, had a corporate retreat down the road from a concentration camp in China and advised a pharmaceutical company to reward pharmacists for causing overdose deaths.
We are the company we keep and the company the Prime Minister keeps is called McKinsey. Once again, how much money did the Prime Minister funnel to his friends at McKinsey?
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- Jan/30/23 2:47:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Prime Minister, Canadians have never had it so bad while Liberal insiders like Dominic Barton have never had it so good.
Dominic Barton was running a government advisory body while at the same time his company was collecting over $100 million in contracts on the side. Barton and his cronies at McKinsey had privileged access to the Prime Minister and were using that access to make money. The government has done so much for Dominic Barton and McKinsey and so little for struggling Canadians.
Once again, will the government answer how much money in total it has given to McKinsey?
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- Dec/13/22 6:41:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is trying to constantly shift this into a debate about whether or not the emergency benefits were a good policy. As he pointed out, all parties supported providing emergency supports during COVID. However, the question is not whether these emergency benefits were required and were valuable. The question is whether the government was right to pay tens of billions of dollars to people who were not eligible for the programs. That is, the House agreed to specific criteria for these programs, and tens of billions of dollars, according to the Auditor General, very likely went to individuals who were not eligible for those programs.
The government said that it had to get the money out quickly at the beginning, fair enough, but the bargain was that there would have to be clear, effective, after-the-fact verification in every case. Either we have to do the verification up front, which is normally what happens, or we have to do some kind of verification after the fact. However, the government has said clearly, in response to the Auditor General's recommendation, that it will not, in fact, do this verification in every case, and the minister attacked the Auditor General on this.
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