Senator Housakos: Senator Gold, the only thing your government is doing is trying to obstruct the parliamentary committee from getting to the bottom of things. You’re deleting emails and preventing us from obtaining answers to simple questions. Senator Gold, “ArriveScam” has been slammed by the procurement watchdog and the Auditor General, and it is currently under criminal investigation. Are they all partisan as well? We know that, at minimum, at least 10,000 Canadians were mistakenly sent to quarantine by glitches of this shameful app. Senator Gold, how can your government — in good conscience — continue to fight these Canadians in court and hold them to huge outstanding fines in relation to what we now know was a fraudulent app?

Senator Housakos: The reason Canadian dollars end up in the hands of terrorists more often than not — and have in the past — is because when our auditors audit the trusted partners, as we call them, they can only audit so far up until that partner subcontracts the work to another entity, at which point the auditors cannot carry out their work.

Everyone knows this. The government knows this. Has the government taken steps in order to put an end to this practice? When we go through these trusted partners, do we insist that they execute the work and not subcontract the work, which leads to Canadian dollars going into the hands of terrorists like Hamas?

Hon. Leo Housakos: Minister, I’m sure you’re aware of the Auditor General’s and the RCMP’s investigation into the outsourcing of contracts in regard to the “ArriveScam” app. If you’re unaware, minister, it’s high time you start reading all of your emails.

One of the two executives from Dalian Enterprises testified before a House committee. He couldn’t explain what his company does for your government. This is odd, not only because this company has zero employees, but also because your government continues to award them numerous contracts. Natural Resources Canada alone has awarded Dalian three separate contracts since March of this year for almost $10 million. The Department of National Defence also uses the services of this company. As a matter of fact, I’m told that Dalian does the majority of this outsourcing with the Department of National Defence.

Surely, minister, you can tell Canadians what it is that Dalian provides to the Department of National Defence, or is this another example of a ghost company billing taxpayers through an elaborate money laundering scheme that is benefiting government insiders?

Senator Housakos: Senator Gold, as if it isn’t bad enough that the Auditor General wasn’t informed of the RCMP investigation into the “ArriveScam,” last week when she appeared at a House committee, your Liberal-NDP government shut down her testimony after only a few minutes — claiming that she had nothing more to add.

How would your government know what she did — or didn’t — have to add, Senator Gold? What do you know that the rest of us don’t know? What is your government hiding when it comes to this?

Senator Housakos: Thank you, Senator Loffreda, for expressing very eloquently the government’s point of view as independently as you might have done. I will, independently of course, ask some questions on behalf of taxpayers in this country — starting with the fact that we saw the Auditor General put out a report very recently calling into question $27.4 billion of COVID spending that you allotted the government. Of course, we participated in getting a lot of that COVID spending out the door very quickly. Clearly now, the Auditor General has questioned the transparency of a lot of that spending.

What in this bill — what mechanisms — and what action has the government taken to make sure that a lot of the programs you just highlighted, and a lot of the new spending that will be taking place, will have better checks and balances than, clearly, the previous couple of budgets that we approved?

Senator Loffreda: Thank you for the question, Senator Housakos. It’s very relevant as, in my previous life, I was an auditor — way back more than 20 years. I started in 1984. How many years is that? I lost count. It’s 38 years, right? So it’s over 20 years.

But I think what does matter here is there are a lot of measures that are there for tax avoidance. A lot of measures are there to show that fiscal responsibility is imperative. I think the government is showing that.

You are right; the Auditor General did state that there has been a lot of COVID spending that has been distributed that must be recovered. We have to recover those funds, so we have to put measures in place to adequately look over as to how they could be recovered.

But this bill — Bill C-32 — is basically the Fall Economic Statement. It’s going forward. It’s putting in measures of tax avoidance, updating the Income Tax Act and looking at ways that we could go against tax avoidance. I’m fully in support of these measures in the bill. Hopefully, in the future, we will have additional measures that will be productive, and go against the unnecessary COVID spending that did occur.

Senator Housakos: Senator Gold, the Auditor General said that it was not effective at all. She found $27 billion in suspicious payments.

Like many of her colleagues, Minister Diane Lebouthillier is making blunder after blunder and, like her colleagues, she never apologizes. Your government is always ready to apologize for mistakes made by others years ago, but it is never ready to take responsibility for its own.

When will the minister apologize to the Auditor General of Canada?

Senator Housakos: Government leader, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC, says that it does not know exactly how much CERB money went to organized crime. However, the Minister of National Revenue told the media that audits of CERB have been under way for some time.

Leader, according to the Canada Revenue Agency, how much CERB money did these audits show was fraudulently claimed by organized crime?