- 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 12:09:03 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is now clear that the costly, crooked, cover-up coalition engaged in corrupt practices in the arrive scam scandal. The Auditor General's report revealed that the government rigged the process, which was that senior officials sat down with the well-connected insider firm, GC Strategies, and discussed and arranged the terms of a deal, which GC Strategies would then bid on. It was able to rig the process, discuss the terms of the deal, which it then bid on and, surprise, got the contract. However, we still do not know why the NDP-Liberal coalition went to such lengths to favour GC Strategies.
Let us paint the picture. GC Strategies is two guys who work out of a basement. They do not do any actual work on projects; they simply receive the contracts and then subcontract them and take massive commissions along the way. It would be as if the member for York—Simcoe and I went out and started Lake Simcoe Enterprises, did no work but just got contracts and passed them along. That would be a good deal for us, but it would be a bad deal for taxpayers.
Why is it that the government did not simply hire the IT professionals to do the work rather than going through a couple of middlemen sitting in their basement who know nothing about IT and whose only business is to go on LinkedIn, find people who can do the work, then get the contracts, find the people to actually do the work, and collect millions of dollars in commissions in the process?
However, the government chose the two people from GC Strategies. The government chose this company to be the favoured son of Liberal corrupt procurement. Why were they chosen? We still do not have an answer to that. Maybe the parliamentary secretary will be able to explain it to the House.
Frankly, we have seen that the government, the Prime Minister and the people working under him, have persistently rigged the process to reward insiders and punish taxpayers, and the process is broken. We will hear Liberals say, “Well, those Conservatives will make cuts. What will they spend less on when they are in government?” I will tell members; it is not rocket science. If there is a two-person firm that receives the contracts then passes them along and does no work in the process, it seems pretty uncomplicated. I mean, it would be ideal to cut out the contracting in general and have the work done inside government, but at least cut out the middleman.
GC Strategies has rightly gotten a lot of attention. It has done very well under the current government. It was founded in 2015 and has done extremely well under the NDP-Liberals. However, there are over 600 different companies doing IT middleman contracting and subcontracting, doing so-called staff augmentation for the public service. This is out of control, and it involves massive amounts of money. There has been a dramatic growth in public service spending but also a dramatic growth in contracting out at the same time, and a substantial amount of the contracting out is going to do-nothing middleman companies and is going to advice from professional services.
Why is the government spending so much and getting so little for Canadians?
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- May/7/24 7:02:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it being May 7, I want to start by wishing my dear wife back home a happy anniversary. With five kids and one more on the way and through four election campaigns, it has been a wild 13 years. I am so grateful to her and to my whole family for supporting me in this important vocation. It involves far more sacrifice for them than it does for me.
The process was rigged. The arrive scam process was rigged in favour of well-connected insider companies. We know this because the procurement ombud's report identified the well-connected insiders at GC Strategies, the small two-person company that the government loved giving deals to, over and over again. GC Strategies, the small two-person company, was actually founded in the same year that the Prime Minister took office. Fancy that.
The company was founded the same year the Prime Minister took office, and it became a favoured go-to supplier for the government. A supplier of what? A supplier of nothing. This company did no work. It simply received contracts and subcontracted all of the work. If the government needed to pay someone to do nothing, GC Strategies was its go-to.
The process was rigged because GC Strategies sat down with folks inside of the government who were deciding the terms of critical contracts. GC Strategies said what the specifications of the contract and the terms of the contract should look like, and that advice was taken. GC Strategies then bid on the contract, which it had informed the development of, and, surprise, it got it. GC Strategies was able to sit down with those developing the contracting process, fix the process by saying exactly what the specifications of the contract could be and then, surprise, it got the deal.
I have continually asked the government why. Why did sketchy companies like GC Strategies develop this favoured stature within the NDP-Liberal government? Why did it continue to go to the same shady characters over and over again to give them these incredibly generous contracts?
On arrive scam alone, this glitchy app that did not work, that sent over 10,000 people into quarantine on an error, that had real horrifying impacts on the lives of Canadians, this company got, according to the Auditor General, almost $20 million for nothing. It simply got the work and then subcontracted all of it to other people. Now that is a glorious gig. It got millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, from the NDP-Liberal government to do nothing. It had the process rigged in its favour when it was a two-person company working out of a basement.
I am trying to understand. There is this systematic rot in the procurement process. This arrive scam issue is just the tip of the iceberg. We keep hearing new reports about broken contracting, contracting across various departments that clearly did not follow the rules.
I want to ask the parliamentary secretary a question. Why did the government rig the process in favour of the shady characters at GC Strategies? Why did the government do it?
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- Apr/8/24 2:09:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister used to say that no relationship was more important to him than Canada's relationship with indigenous peoples, and yet the NDP-Liberal government has been using indigenous contracting to funnel money to well-connected government insiders in ways that produce no actual benefit for indigenous communities. This is a gross betrayal of taxpayers and indigenous peoples.
David Yeo is the arrive scam contractor whose company made $8 million while, according to his own LinkedIn page, he was simultaneously a government employee. We still do not know what he actually did for the money. Yeo's two-person company benefited from an indigenous contracting set aside, even though no indigenous communities saw any of the money.
Indigenous leaders have warned that the Liberal approach to contracting is encouraging shell companies and other modes of obfuscation to gain an advantage in procurement processes, all to the detriment of legitimate indigenous peoples of Canada, communities and businesses.
It is time to end the corruption, to respect taxpayers and to insist that indigenous contracting policies actually benefit indigenous peoples, not well-connected NDP-Liberal insiders.
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- Apr/8/24 1:00:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, very clearly, under the NDP-Liberal government, contracting out is out of control. There has been a ballooning of external contracting, as well as significant growth in the public service.
Do I think it is never reasonable to contract out? No, I do not think that. I think there are cases where contracting out is legitimate. However, we have seen an excessive use of management consulting and the use of unethical companies like McKinsey. There are contracts to contract, to subcontract and so on. I think our position is a reasonable and balanced one, which is that we need to have proper accountability and spending controls.
The NDP is very disingenuous. It continually votes confidence and supply to its Liberal partners to allow them to pursue the same policies the member claims to denounce. If the member wants to actually see any kind of reform, if he wants to see us move away from the kind of excessive contracting out and the waste we have seen under the Liberal government, I would challenge him to put his money where his mouth is and to vote no confidence in the government.
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- Feb/1/24 3:03:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the NDP-Liberal government has built the worst imaginable system for government contracting. The arrive scam watchdog report found that the government built a system where companies that charge the least are penalized. They actually built a system in which people are rewarded for charging a high price and punished for charging a lower price. “Please sir, we want to pay even more.” It is no wonder the Prime Minister is so out of touch and is not worth the cost.
After eight years, the only explanation for this is complete insanity or outright corruption. Which is it?
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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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