Hon. Leo Housakos: Senator Gold, over the last two years, your government paid a company called GC Strategies over $164 million for IT work. It is the same company responsible for the $54-million ArriveCAN app. This company has two owners but no employees. Neither of those two owners do any IT work. They subcontract all the work, and, of course, that’s a practice that allows the government to hide key information from public scrutiny.

Senator Gold, who in the Trudeau government made the decision to hire this company? Who in your government thought that the height of the pandemic was the time to go with a small, unproven company — with no employees and no expertise — to develop an app that you keep describing as being so pivotal in the government’s response to COVID? To which members of the Trudeau government are these insiders connected?