- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- May/21/24 1:21:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my question relates to the minister's own portfolio. The government's indigenous procurement policy obliges that when indigenous companies are hired under the policy, a certain proportion of those subcontractors be indigenous. However, documents shared with the government operations committee show that there is absolutely no tracking of subcontractors.
Does the minister think it is acceptable that adherence to the requirements on indigenous subcontracting are not being tracked by the government?
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- May/7/24 7:10:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the fact is that my hon. friend has read his pre-prepared statement about government procurement policy, but he has not answered the basic question. The question is why the government rigged the process in favour of this shady two-person company that was working out of somebody's basement. How did this company, which was just founded in the same year the Prime Minister took office, manage to get so much money from the government?
If I started a company in my basement tomorrow with one other person, I suspect we would not be turning over tens of millions of dollars in government contracts, within a short space of time, for doing no work. It is pretty clear that there is some reason the government was constantly funnelling money to and through GC Strategies, and the process was, in fact, as we know, rigged in their favour.
As such, why did the government continuously funnel money to and through GC Strategies? Why did it do that?
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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 12:57:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was greatly amused by the member's question. I thank him for bringing joy and levity to the House. Of course, we are speaking about the predatory, unholy mixing of the elite consultant class with the state.
The member could reflect on how this procurement scandal really speaks to the negative effects on workers of big government trying to take more and more control, a government that is in bed with a few well-connected consultants, and that this kind of state capital, as opposed to a true free market system, is what is undermining the well-being of Canadians.
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- Feb/27/24 6:26:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canada's common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. This is in contrast to the Liberal record. The Liberals have axed the homes, built the crime, hiked the tax and stopped the budgeting.
We are here to discuss the arrive scam scandal and, in particular, the procurement ombudsman's excellent report. Today, the procurement ombudsman was before the public accounts committee, and he confirmed that he is not at all surprised that the RCMP is now investigating the corruption at the heart of the government.
In the arrive scam scandal, we see multiple layers of costly criminal corruption in the government's procurement system. The procurement ombudsman found that the government built a system for procurement designed to encourage companies to charge the government more. This is really incredible. If they charged too little, their bids or points might be removed, so the incentive was built right into the system for companies to charge more.
The procurement ombudsman found a chronic problem of so-called bait and switch. This is where the bidding company says it is going to have one person do the work, then it switches and has someone else do the work, someone who is potentially substantially less qualified. This builds on what we already know: GC Strategies, the company that got the ArriveCAN contract, was changing and falsifying resumés they submitted to the government, and the government rigged the process.
Members of the government sat down with the GC Strategies team to set the terms of the contract, such that GC Strategies would get the deal. This is a two-person company that subcontracts all the actual work, and yet the government sat down with this company and rigged the process so it would get the contracts. It built a system that would favour insiders to ensure GC Strategies got the deal. On top of that, it designed a process that would encourage GC Strategies and others to charge the government more, not less.
It is no wonder that spending is out of control and that Canadians are struggling under the pressure of higher taxes and the impact of higher deficits. When the government designs contracting-out processes, it designs systems to try to charge more. The levels of cost, crime and corruption we see in this arrive scam scandal are really incredible.
The RCMP is investigating. I asked the Prime Minister today whether the government will co-operate with the RCMP investigation. There was no answer. We had the procurement ombudsman's investigation report and the Auditor General's report, which reveal what happened. However, we now need to identify who the responsible individuals are and why they did it. Why was the process rigged in order to give this deal to this two-person company working out of a basement? Why was it rigged to GC Strategies' advantage? Why did the government create a system designed to charge taxpayers more, not less?
These are the key questions that need to be answered by the government, but I will distill it into one simple point. The RCMP is now investigating criminal behaviour as part of the arrive scam scandal. The parliamentary secretary was formerly with the Ontario government and has a great deal of experience dealing with issues of corruption. Could he tell the House, yes or no, whether the government will co-operate with the RCMP's investigation?
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- Feb/12/24 5:41:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on an excellent speech and his excellent work. I want to ask him a question about economic reconciliation as it relates to procurement. One of the ways we advance economic reconciliation is that we seek to ensure that government procurement is available to indigenous-owned businesses as well as to businesses owned by other historically disadvantaged communities, and that there are not aspects of the procurement system that are excluding people who have been historically disadvantaged.
One of the problems we have seen as we have unravelled the Auditor General's arrive scam report is that there are systems built into government procurement that are designed to advantage incumbent players; that is, someone has to have had a certain number of contracts with the Government of Canada already. This means that if someone has not dealt with the government before, has started a new business or has had other governments as clients but has have never sold products to the federal government before, they are systematically disadvantaged.
In the past, I have heard from stakeholders asking, for example, why we are not meeting our targets in terms of indigenous-owned businesses' getting government procurement. We then find out, in the context of the procurement ombudsman's report, that one of the reasons is probably that there is a systematic advantage, as a result of the way the system is designed, that steers toward incumbent players and insiders, even if other people have innovative ideas.
I would be curious to have the member's thoughts on how we can advance economic reconciliation by addressing some of the issues in the arrive scam scandal, and more broadly, on what prevents new entrants from participating in government procurement.
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- Feb/6/24 7:54:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates has been gripped by the arrive scam scandal: the way the government spent $54 million on a glitchy app that did not work and the fact that it chose GC Strategies, a two-person company that did no actual IT work and simply subcontracted all the work.
How did this happen? Who was responsible? Who had the relationships with GC Strategies? Who created the procurement system that allowed a two-person company that does no IT work to get this contract and, essentially, to simply be able to receive and subcontract the work? This is the work the government operations committee has been trying to get to the bottom of.
The government is now intimidating witnesses who spoke out at committee. Here is what happened. Supposedly there was an ongoing internal investigation within the government into what happened in the context of the ArriveCAN procurement. The investigator in this case is not independent; this is an internal investigation. The so-called investigator reports through the existing chain of command within CBSA. He effectively reports to people who could be under a cloud of suspicion in the context of the investigation.
On November 7, 2023, two witnesses, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano, came before the government operations committee. In response to questions, in particular from Conservatives, they gave devastating testimony. They identified people inside the government who, they said, were lying and were covering up information. They identified conversations that happened between the minister's office and the senior public servants that were filtered to them. While other public servants were very reserved and limited in their responses to questions, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano gave very direct and very forthright responses that were critical of actions taken by others, especially more senior people within the chain of command.
Surprisingly, almost immediately after that, on November 27, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano received a letter saying that they were the subject of internal investigation. They had not been notified of this before. Coincidentally, apparently, they were told they were under investigation immediately after they offered critical testimony at committee. Then the government went further and suspended these senior public servants from their jobs without pay, even though the internal investigation has not been completed. There is an ongoing internal investigation not complete, yet two people have been suspended without pay.
This is very suspicious. The government is under a cloud of suspicion over this procurement, so it has an internal investigator; however, the internal investigator has not even completed the investigation but has submitted interim findings that apparently point the finger at people who have been critical of the same senior public servants to whom this investigator in fact is subject, and they have been suspended without pay.
This very clearly, given the timeline, looks like retaliation against public servants who have spoken out about the arrive scam scandal. There is a big problem here. There is the underlying issue of corruption in the arrive scam contracting, $54 million to a company that did no actual work but just subcontracted all of the work, but then there are people who have provided testimony about it, not the testimony the government wanted to hear, apparently, who are suddenly suspended without pay.
How does the government justify retaliating against witnesses who criticize it?
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- Nov/29/23 7:22:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, J.F.K. purportedly said once that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. From this, we can gather that the decision to hire GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app was a failure because nobody will admit to being the one responsible. Nobody wants to claim the parentage of this terrible decision.
Conservatives have been persistently prosecuting this case of the arrive scam scandal. The government spent $54 million. It contracted GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app. The RCMP is now investigating some of the contractors involved. We have repeatedly asked a simple question: Who is the person responsible for the decision to hire GC Strategies? This is a two-person company. Nobody in the company does any IT work. All they do is receive the contract and then subcontract it. They go on LinkedIn and send messages to people asking them to do the work. They do not do any of the work themselves. They just receive the contract and subcontract it.
It is like if you, Madam Speaker, hired me for $100 to paint your fence, and then I went and hired another member to paint the fence for $50. They did the work. You paid me and I collected a whole bunch of money in the middle. That is essentially how GC Strategies operated in this case and in other cases. It does not have the people or capacity to do the actual work.
By all indications, it was a terrible decision to spend enormous amounts of public money through GC Strategies for this overpriced, glitchy, ineffective app. We have all kinds of things that have come out during the discussion of this issue. We have doctored resumés that have, in another case, been presented to the Government of Canada. We have systemic questions about how the procurement process works. We also have senior public servants accusing each other of lying about who made the decision. This is quite incredible. We have senior public servants Cameron MacDonald and Minh Doan accusing each other of lying about who made the decision to go with GC Strategies.
Again, we have repeatedly, in this House and in committee, asked who was responsible for this decision. I put the question to the Minister of Procurement yesterday, but he did not answer. Under the Liberal-NDP government, over the last eight years, we have seen how everything is broken, but nobody is responsible. Apparently anything that goes wrong is nobody's responsibility. Again, as J.F.K. said, victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
There are a lot of orphans according to the Liberals. They said they did not make the decision and it was external factors. This was a decision of someone in government. Somebody decided this two-man company working out of a basement doing no IT work were the right people to build this app. They were the right people to spend $54 million on.
We will continue to ask the government this simple question: Who made the decision? Was it a minister? Was it the Minister of Public Safety or the Minister of Procurement? Was it a particular senior official? We have senior officials actually accusing each other of lying. They are saying, “It was not me. It was that guy.” The government is ultimately responsible for the decisions made while it is in power. It has been in power for eight years.
It is a simple question. I hope the parliamentary secretary will answer. Who made the decision to choose GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app?
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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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Mr. Speaker, the budget claims that the government plans to reduce spending on outside consultants. This is at a time when we have seen massive increases in government spending inside of government and on outside consultants.
In terms of the government's relationship with McKinsey, can the government confirm that it will be joining B.C.'s class action lawsuit against McKinsey for its role in the opioid crisis? Would the fact that the Government of Canada will now be suing McKinsey be likely to change its procurement practices with respect to McKinsey?
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- May/19/22 8:42:57 p.m.
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Madam Chair, that is the third time I have asked this question. Is any part of government procurement happening from Nuctech, and is any part of government purchasing surveillance cameras or security equipment made in China?
I hope we get an accurate answer.
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- May/19/22 8:42:10 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to be very clear, because I am not just asking about embassies. I am asking in general, across government procurement.
Has any part of the government purchased products produced by Nuctech or purchased any surveillance cameras or other security equipment made in China?
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- May/19/22 8:35:19 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time. My questions today will focus on procurement and human rights. The member for Scarborough—Guildwood, who is a member of the Liberal party, observed in the House yesterday that, “We have gone through a period of time in the last two or three years where we may have sourced goods which we, in other instances, may not or would not have sourced from dubious sources.”
Does the minister agree with her colleague?
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Madam Speaker, I always find it a little bit disorienting when a love-in emerges in the House of Commons.
I want to say that I am in support of this legislation. I think it is important that we try to allow debate to collapse today so that the bill can move forward to committee and we can begin the work of studying it at committee and proposing constructive amendments. Our party believes that stronger action is required to address the issue of supply chain slavery, the issue of it happening in the private sector and issues in government procurement.
The member quite ably spoke to the fact that many parties have spoken about this. I think it has also been acknowledged that this bill is not going to solve every problem. It is an important step. Let us work to pass the bill and strengthen it. Then let us also think about other things that may be required to move this work forward.
I have a couple of other points about the issue of supply chain slavery that I want to put on the record.
I think the points on the capacity of other countries and the need for strengthened international co-operation in combatting these issues are very important. We are one country. We are trying to do a similar thing that other like-minded countries are trying to do, which is address issues of forced labour. Why can we not collaborate more in identifying where the problems are and in sharing information to strengthen our enforcement?
I will mention as well that in the United States, the House has passed the uyghur forced labor prevention act, which designates the East Turkestan region as a place where we know there is a great deal of forced labour happening. It says that in the case of that region, there is a reverse onus: It is presumed that slave labour is involved unless proven otherwise, because there is such a significant problem in that place. I would support that kind of measure and/or a mechanism of regional designation allowing a government of the day to say that a particular country or region is a place where there is a huge problem, so we need to treat products coming out of this region in a different way. That is not in the bill, but I think the process of regional designation is something we should explore as a Parliament.
One of the proposals put forward by the business community in this area is for the government to create an entities list to identify suppliers that are known to be problematic. I think that would be very helpful. Some small businesses would fall below the threshold in this legislation, and there are obviously challenges in trying to identify where the problems are in supply chains. If the government could work on an entities list to support the work that is required, that would be helpful as well.
In general, I look forward to the discussion at committee. This is important legislation. I think it moves the ball forward, and we need to continue the conversation to do all we can to advance justice and human rights. I look forward to working with colleagues and all parties to try to do that.
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- May/12/22 4:30:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the issue of Nuctech was discussed at certain points in the committee. More broadly, we see this trend where my party, and some members of Parliament in other parties as well, are aware of the significant risks that come with doing business with Chinese state-owned and state-affiliated companies: the risks to our security and also the risks to human rights.
Notwithstanding the fact that these issues are being discussed, there does not seem to be a sort of fulsome penetration of the recognition of this problem within all aspects of the bureaucracy, where there still are significant gaps in terms of procurement happening that raise major questions and concerns about national security and human rights. We have yet to hear a decision from the government on allowing Huawei into our 5G network. It has been years that we have been told the decision is coming. We need to have decisions on this, and we need to move forward in a way that reflects the recognition of the problem across all levels of government.
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