- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- May/28/24 12:16:15 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is unbelievable to me that the NDP-Liberals are still defending the arrive scam policy. The fact is that this app was a disaster. Sixty million dollars was spent. A big chunk of it went to this do-nothing middleman company. Most versions of the app, according to the Auditor General, were not tested. As a result, over 10,000 people who followed all the rules were accidentally sent into quarantine because of a glitch in the app.
We can imagine that someone does everything they are supposed to. They are coming back home; they are supposed to be able to see their family and get back to work. They are sent into quarantine, not because they are supposed to go, but because the government could not be bothered to test the app. Rather, it hired two guys working out of a basement with no IT experience, who went on LinkedIn to find other people to do the work.
The Auditor General very clearly said that there is no excuse. The government continues to make excuses in spite of it. Does the government have no shame? Will it finally admit what a disaster the arrive scam policy was?
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- Feb/26/24 3:05:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, Canadians know that the NDP-Liberal government is not worth the cost or the corruption. With the help of the NDP, the Liberals gave at least $20 million to a two-person company during the arrive scam scandal for no work done, and Canadians want their money back.
Meanwhile, the Auditor General found a stark absence of documentation. Reports now show that tens of thousands of emails were illegally deleted.
Will the Prime Minister and his NDP partners who are responsible for this scandal stand up and tell us when they will release the documents that are missing?
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Madam Speaker, I think it is noteworthy that, regardless of how unexpected or expected events may have been, all of our allies have moved much more quickly than we have to introduce these exemptions. I want to ask the parliamentary secretary as well for her response to the Auditor General's report today. It shows that the government is failing to measure results when it comes to its so-called feminist international assistance policy. Twenty-four out of 26 policy indicators do not actually measure results. The government talks a lot about this, but it is not measuring its impact on the ground.
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- Feb/7/23 3:02:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in other words, the government's approach to the Liberal-McKinsey scandal is to ask the minister to investigate herself. However, we found out yesterday at the government operations committee that she lacks a basic understanding of the record and experience of this company, including its relationship with Purdue Pharma.
Conservatives have said Liberals investigating themselves is not good enough, which is why we need an independent investigation by Canada's Auditor General, an Auditor General, by the way, who has been disparaged by the Minister of National Revenue.
With so many Canadians struggling, will the government support our call today for an independent investigation by the Auditor General into why over $100 million of contracts went to—
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- Feb/6/23 3:42:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, certainly on this side of the House, we are prepared to work with any individuals and any parties that want to help us get to the bottom of these scandals that we have seen under the current government. There has been a ceding of control by Liberals to outside consultants. There has been a waste of money in duplication of efforts. There have been conflicts of interest.
There are significant concerns about what McKinsey is up to around the world and the conflicts of interest that exist where they are working for both sides of the same issue. For instance, they are working for the Canadian Department of National Defence while working for hostile interests around the world. These are all issues that we need to get to the bottom of. I hope that this House will support the value-for-money audit that we need to see happen from the Auditor General, as well as some of the other ongoing work that is required to get to the bottom of this Liberal-McKinsey scandal.
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- Feb/6/23 3:40:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in fact the motion that is before the House asks for those records from 2011, so we are quite open to the Auditor General's doing that work as well. My understanding of the record is that there were very small volumes in that earlier period and that there has been dramatic, 50-fold growth under the current government.
I would just say that some of the ethical scandals I have mentioned, including the collaboration with state-owned and affiliated companies around the world, the work with the Government of Saudi Arabia and the work with Purdue Pharma, have come out subsequently.
The government has been in power for eight years. We have seen what the Liberals have done, including dramatically increasing spending on outside consultants and McKinsey in particular. The government has to be accountable for its record.
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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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- 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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- Dec/13/22 6:33:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, on Tuesday last week, the Auditor General released an absolutely damning report on the government's COVID-19 programs. This is report 10 from the Auditor General. This report chronicled mismanagement, waste and a lack of focus leading to tens of billions of dollars in government waste.
Let us be very clear: We are not talking about the policy of the COVID support programs. This was a policy that, in principle, all parties supported and it is not the Auditor General's mandate to critique the government's policy, but rather to analyze the effectiveness of implementation. That is whether the actions of government lined up with the stated policy goals.
The Auditor General pointed out that the government made a policy decision not to have an effective pre-disbursement review. It basically relied on an attestation model, an honour system, where people would say they met the criteria and they would get the benefits. Many Canadians were honest and accurate in how they filled those out.
Generally, we say there should be some kind of verification mechanism, either before or afterward. The government said that it needed to get these dollars out the door quickly in terms of these benefits, so it did not do the advance verification, but it said it would do verification after the fact. It would follow up and see if the money went to the right people, and if it did not go to the right people, it would follow up in the appropriate fashion.
The government is now saying it is not going to do those after-the-fact reviews and verifications in every case. For much of the money that the government spent in various COVID-19 support programs, there was no checking before the money went out and no checking after the money was received. This means people could simply attest that they were eligible for benefits. They got cheques as a result and there was no verification.
The Auditor General was able, based on data the government already had available, to assess what indicators there were of whether people who did not meet the requirements of various programs ended up getting money anyway. Here is what she found.
Incredibly, she found that $4.6 billion went to ineligible recipients. That means people who were not eligible for these programs still got money to the tune of $4.6 billion.
Another $27.4 billion went to individuals who, on the face of it, did not meet the program criteria where the Auditor General conservatively says further investigation is required. There were cases, for instance, where individuals did not meet the income requirements, yet still received CERB.
The total of certainly ineligible or almost certainly ineligible, based on the Auditor General's analysis of data in the government's own possession, came to $32 billion. Some $32 billion of COVID-19 benefits went out to individuals who were not eligible for those benefits.
Again, we are not talking about whether offering this support was a good idea. We are talking about whether the government should be held accountable for over $30 billion going to those who did not meet the stated criteria for those programs.
The Auditor General is recommending in this report that the government follow up, get to the bottom of this and track down that money. The government does not agree, does not support it and will not implement this recommendation of the Auditor General. It says, on the final page of the report, that it will not follow up with every one of these cases, as the Auditor General recommends.
The response of the Minister of National Revenue when this issue was raised in the House was to impugn the Auditor General's independence. The Minister of National Revenue got up in this House and said that the Auditor General made the decisions and the recommendations because of pressure from the opposition, which is a totally outrageous attack on a strong, independent public servant by the government simply to cover up its own incompetence.
The government wasted $30 billion. It should be held accountable for that waste and it should not be attacking the Auditor General.
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- Dec/6/22 2:59:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government is attacking the Auditor General's independence in order to cover up its own incompetence.
More than $30 billion went to ineligible recipients; that is, people who did not meet the criteria of the programs. When the Auditor General called this out, the government's response was to criticize the work of a strong, independent professional whom the Liberals, in fact, appointed.
Will the Minister of Revenue apologize to the Auditor General and agree to accept all her recommendations?
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Madam Speaker, while today the government is asking the House to expedite its spending, we have the Auditor General revealing tens of billions of dollars in inflationary waste associated with the government's past spending. Tens of billions of dollars went out the door to people with clearly identified risk factors for not actually being eligible for the programs they were receiving money for: There were no spending controls before the money was spent and no spending controls afterwards. Essentially the government is handing out money through its programs on the basis of an honour system. If one says one is eligible, one gets the money, and there is no checking before or after. Over $30 billion in spending was identified, associated with very likely risk factors in the Auditor General's report.
I have a simple question for the minister with respect to the Auditor General's report. The Auditor General has come up with clear recommendations to try to address this problem of tens of billions of dollars of inflationary waste. Will the government accept and implement all the recommendations of the Auditor General, yes or no?
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