- Member of Parliament
- Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- Conservative
- Calgary Midnapore
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $141,419.87
- Government Page
- May/8/24 10:08:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks, I would like to state that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman. I certainly look forward to his remarks as well.
Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my constituency office when I got a message from my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. He informed me that there was going to be a special meeting of a small group of us, where he would inform us of a very grave and serious situation. I do not know if one has ever received news where one was told they are the target of a cyber-attack, but I will say that it is terrifying. It is a moment in someone's life when the blood drains from one's face.
When someone is told the date of those attacks, January 2021, one wonders what they were doing that month. What was going on in their life that month? How serious is this attack? It is something I do not want anyone to ever experience again, in this chamber or anywhere else in the world, but unfortunately, it happened.
One starts to wonder if this happened to me, and this also happened to other colleagues in the House of Commons, then clearly, this is also happening within our nation. Who is attempting to obtain what information? How successful are they? How many attacks like this are going on at this time? Worse than that, the Liberal government knew about this attack, yet it did not inform me, and it did not inform my colleagues. It is reprehensible. It is absolutely horrible.
I would like to thank again the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China for informing myself and my colleagues that we were the targets of such an attack. I would also like to thank the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States of America for once again doing the heavy lifting that the Liberal government should be doing. It is shameful that we were informed, through foreign governments, that we were under attack.
Unfortunately, it is not a surprise to me. It is not a surprise at all because we found out, just this past week, in the foreign interference report that the former member for Steveston—Richmond East was not successful in his election campaign as a result of foreign interference.
Last year, we saw the effects of a foreign government, the same PRC government, on the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, who sits in this very aisle. He was also the victim of the interference of a foreign government in an attempt to try to gain information on his family to try to intimidate him.
Unfortunately, I had the honour of being the shadow minister for democratic institutions back in 2018-19. At that time, I begged the member for Burlington to do something about it at that time, and it fell upon deaf ears.
We set up things like the Leaders' Debates Commission, which housed a member of the WE Charity scandal. The commission was overseen by the former special rapporteur, who clearly failed in his mission to try to keep this chamber and to keep Canadians safe. We saw the implementation of the toothless digital charter, which achieved nothing to protect Canadians and to protect members of the House.
We spent hours going over Bill C-76, where we talked about things like vouching. We talked about things like returning officers. We talked about things like the closing of polls across our nation, yet this did very little to solve the problem that is in front of us now, which is foreign interference.
Once again, it is the absence of responsibility of the Liberal government not only to do something about foreign interference, but also to even have the courtesy, the decency and the moral placement to let members of the House know that they were under attack and under threat. We did not get that courtesy, and it is an absolute shame.
Once again, we have seen that the government has done too little, too late. We see this time and time again. We saw this in 2019, when I would try and raise questions with the member for Burlington, with the Prime Minister of Canada, and the only response I would receive was that the Prime Minister had an indication that there had been some interference by Russia in the 2015 election, which is very cold comfort at this time, given what we know now.
The 2018-19 election was, my goodness, five years ago now. The Liberals have had five years to do something. Clearly, they have not spent their time doing anything. They are, once again, doing what they do best and that is creating the illusion of doing something when, in fact, they are happy to do nothing because, as we saw with the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, as we saw with the member for Steveston—Richmond East, it benefits them to do nothing, so they have done nothing, and they will keep doing nothing.
Even if I blame the member for Burlington, I know that this direction was from the top. There is no doubt in my mind that this direction was from the top, and the same thing here. I am sure that the Liberals wanted to ignore the cyber-attack and that they wanted to ignore the potential harm it could have caused me, my family and 17 other members of the House. They wanted to turn a blind eye to that because that is what they do. They do not want to take responsibility for the types of atrocities that take place against myself, against other members of the House and against the Canadian people.
The good news about this is that this will not deter myself, and this will not deter the leader of the official opposition from continuing to stand up for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, not only in this nation, but also across the world as well. Members will continue to see us standing side by side with our allies in Taiwan, in Israel and in Ukraine. Once again, this is something that we do not see the Liberal government doing.
We see the government picking and choosing winners and losers, speaking out of both sides of its mouth, again, not only to the harm of people in the House, not only to the harm of Canadians, but also to the harm of people across the world. As I said, that is because this government will always turn a blind eye. Do members know what happens when we turn a blind eye? Evil prevails. Evil prevails in the House when the current government turns a blind eye. Evil prevails across this country when the government is not willing to take responsibility, as I begged the member for Burlington to do all those years ago; and evil prevails across the globe.
It is not a surprise that I was informed, after the fact, that this government had neglected its responsibility to keep our citizens safe and to keep members of this chamber safe, who were informed by a foreign entity, by someone else doing the work that the Liberals should be doing. Shame on them for trying to hide it from us and for keeping it from us. Once again, they would know, Canadians would know, that they had shirked their responsibility and that they had not done what they were supposed to do in overseeing the safety of the House and the safety of the members of the House.
As I said, I have, unfortunately, seen this time and time again, so it is not a surprise to me at all that we were left in this position and that we were left as targets of this foreign government and other foreign governments that are looking into us. I am not naive. I was in the Canadian foreign service, now elected to the House, and I understand that, I am sure, I will always be a target for those foreign governments. However, this government was informed by another government and was informed by another organization that is attempting to do the work that the Liberals should be doing, which is keeping Canadians safe and keeping members of the House safe.
We can refer this matter to PROC. I certainly hope that we do, but I hope it is with greater results than the previous times, when we saw Bill C-76 come out of PROC with no shield for the members of the House and no shield for Canadians. I hope, this time, that the Liberal government takes foreign interference seriously, does not pretend and actually does something about it.
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- Apr/18/24 2:54:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will tell the member what is inappropriate. The ArriveCAN app is under RCMP investigation, but we now know that there are two RCMP investigations connected to GC Strategies. The raid on Kristian Firth's house two days ago raises more concerns about both contracts, one of which we now know has a connection to the Deputy Prime Minister's office.
After nine years, GC Strategies has been paid more than $100 million by the Liberal government. Will the Deputy Prime Minister co-operate with the RCMP investigation?
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- Feb/27/24 3:05:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption. The government spent a minimum of $60 million on arrive scam. It could even be more. We do not know because there is missing documentation. IT middlemen at GC Strategies got $20 million for doing no actual work. The top cop in the RCMP announced today a full investigation into arrive scam.
Today, the Prime Minister has a decision to make: Will he co-operate with the RCMP, or will he obstruct justice, as he usually does?
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- Feb/27/24 1:38:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to stand in the House of Commons to speak on behalf of the people of Calgary Midnapore.
I think everyone has had a situation in his or her life such as going through the grocery store, putting items in the cart, getting to the checkout and having to remove items. Maybe it was a crazy night out. Maybe it was eating too many candies after time with friends or family. We have all had a situation in our lives where, as we are at with arrive scam today, we have asked ourselves how something even happened.
How this even happened is the big question for today. That is why we, official opposition members, are asking the Liberal government to table a report by March 18 showing the complete costs of arrive scam, and to this date we have no idea what those really are, and to collect and recoup all the funds paid to contractors who did no work. We know there were many, and certainly one in particular. We have this opposition day motion before us today because Canadians are asking how this even happened.
ArriveCAN was an application that was supposed to cost $80,000. This is what a group of individuals who spent a weekend replicating the application said it could be done for. Lo and behold, the indicated price of this increased to a couple dozen million and then, more recent, we found out that this app had cost $54 million; that is $54 million for an application that individuals said they could have built for $80,000.
Recently, with the report of the Auditor General, we found out it cost a minimum of $60 million, and we are not even certain that is the total amount because of the poor documentation done by the government, which speaks to its incompetence.
The main vendor behind this is the infamous GC Strategies, the two-person company working out of its basement, which we originally thought was paid $11 million. After the Auditor General's report, we found out it was closer to $19 million. Again, we are not entirely sure because the documentation is not there to even prove that is all it was paid.
It was recently released in the press that this company, this two-person company working out of its basement and not even doing any work, has been given a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts by the NDP-Liberal coalition, by the Liberal government, which is an incredible amount.
Within the arrive scam application and its vendors, we have the possibility of collusion, of price-fixing and certainly inflation of prices, all of these things. One of my colleagues, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, questioned the witnesses. He asked them over and over again what they did and they could not even respond. They were unable to answer the question.
GC Strategies was also determined to have forged résumés in an effort to get these contracts. We all know the penalty for doing this, for example, if one is applying for a private position, or applying to a university or forging a transcript. These things are unheard of, yet it was done by this vendor, which was paid a quarter of a billion dollars by the Liberal government.
We have the destruction of documents by the chief information officer at the time of arrive scam. One cannot even make this stuff up. Again, how did this even happen? Canadians are wondering that.
It gets worse. The head of the CBSA did not even report the RCMP investigation of GC Strategies to the Auditor General, who found out about it in The Globe and Mail. The government is so dysfunctional that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Then we have the integrity director within the CBSA investigating the situation.
We are seeing what happens time and time again. The government is investigating itself. I am not sure where this holds up to be evident. I certainly would love the opportunity, and I think many people would, where we determine ourselves whether we have done wrongdoing or not. Unfortunately, democracy is not supposed to work this way and Canada is not supposed to work this way, but this is the way the arrive scam is. Therefore, again, how did this even happen?
Those who have evaluated what happened here, and we have not even gotten to the RCMP investigation, have not found good things. We had the procurement ombud review of arrive scam and his words were very damning. He found that out of 41 ArriveCAN-related procurements, 23 contracts were issued using a competitive process, but 31.7% of all contracts were non-competitive, sole-source contracts, which is one-third. It is terrible. We also found that 43.5% of contracts were from disincentive bidders using lower rates and encouraging bidders to pick a less risky hire rate. Members may have also heard that GC Strategies, this firm that we have talked so much about in the House of Commons, even won a bid because it wrote the terms to win the bid. It was making up the rules so it could win the bid. It goes on and on.
I will point out everything we see with the arrive scam. We see the incompetence of the government. We see the government not accepting responsibility. We see the complete lack of respect for the taxpayer and no value for money here, and I will talk about that a bit more in a minute. As a microcosm of the government and how it has spent the last close to nine years now, the arrive scam is, sadly, a microcosm event.
It gets worse after the review of the procurement ombud who gave the arrive scam a failing grade. Two weeks ago, and the Liberal government did not want this to happen, we had the release, finally, of the Auditor General's reports. Whatever excuse the Liberals tried to use for the arrive scam, such as the crisis situation, she said that it was not an excuse to not get value for money for the Canadian taxpayer. We found that 18% of invoices submitted by contractors did not have supporting documentation. We know now that task authorities were issued and paid for while not even having tasks assigned to them. Essentially, people could have been paid for work that they did not even complete. It is absolutely unbelievable.
In addition, in the Auditor General's report, $12.2 million could not even be associated to ArriveCAN, or the arrive scam. This amount is unbelievable. We also found in her report that per diem rates were $1,090 per day compared to the $675 comparable IT positions in other departments. It is just astounding that these things could happen with the arrive scam, that there could be such blatant disregard for the taxpayer.
However, this is happening by the Liberal government in this day and age. It is a government that just had a $23.6 billion deficit between April and December of last year, a government that is sending over a million Canadians to food banks and a government that is allowing one in five Canadians to skip meals. The arrive scam is a complete microcosm of the government and this failure.
The good news, as we found out today, is that the RCMP investigation has now been extended to include the arrive scam, which is a big victory for us on this side of the House, our tenacity in our quest for the truth, our not wanting to give up on finding the truth for Canadians and on getting value for them.
However, the final question that remains, which I started my speech with, is how did this even happen?
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- Feb/14/24 2:21:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of a Liberal-NDP government, the RCMP is once again investigating a Liberal deal.
Two of the contractors involved in the creation of the ArriveCan app are already being investigated for their potentially criminal acts to obtain contracts, but that investigation will not even scratch the surface of everything that was hidden from Canadians. GC Strategies, an IT firm of two people that did no actual IT work, was paid over $19 million just to find people to build this $60-million app. This is not to mention it's also rigging the bidding process for a $25-million contract that only it could win, and it does not stop there.
Reports are out this morning revealing that this two-person headhunting firm has gotten as much as 250 million taxpayer dollars since 2015. This RCMP investigation needs to be expanded to understand what really happened in the building of this app and who is responsible for this huge waste of taxpayer money.
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- Oct/23/23 2:17:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal-NDP government is once again in the midst of a scandal and criminal investigation. The RCMP is currently investigating allegations of identity theft, forged resumés, contractual theft, fraudulent billing, price-fixing and collusion in the creation of the $54-million ArriveCAN app.
Two whistle-blowers trapped in this scandal came forward to the media. This is the only reason we now know about it, as government officials were forced by their political masters to lie to Canadians about this contract. This investigation was hidden by GC Strategies, the Canada Border Services Agency and numerous Liberal ministers during our study last year. They deliberately withheld the truth from this House and from Canadians.
The Liberal-NDP government will engage in criminal behaviour to pay their friends millions and continue their cover-up before they tell the truth. The Prime Minister once again has shown that he is not worth the cost.
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