- 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
- Mar/19/24 2:10:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians continue to ask questions about the ArriveCAN app, and Conservatives continue to push for answers.
Last week, we continued to prosecute GC Strategies, an IT firm of two people who performed no actual work, yet it was paid a third of $60 million in contracts for the ArriveCAN app. After hiding from accountability to the point of being threatened with arrest, the two individuals finally appeared at committee.
Although they were still evasive, MPs were able to learn that the two partners pocketed $2.5 million, and for what? One partner, Kristian Firth, that said he had averaged two to four hours per day at a rate of $2,600 per hour. His partner said that he had no clue as to what went on at any point in the ArriveCAN process and only processed the security clearances for their subcontractors, a job he did wrong.
The Liberal government must listen up. It must explain why it wasted millions of dollars. Canadians want their money back, so it should start explaining and pay up.
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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/26/24 2:13:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we continue to see unbelievable hypocrisy from the leader of the NDP.
Yet again, he is pretending to be outraged by the actions of his Liberal coalition partner while expecting Canadians to ignore the fact that he is the Prime Minister's chief enabler. The NDP say they are angered by the waste and corruption behind the “arrive scam” app, yet it would never have happened without their support.
The Prime Minister needed his coalition cohort to have enough votes to get the money through Parliament. The leader of the NDP was more than happy to vote yes, at least eight times, to give tens of millions for cost overruns and money-for-nothing contracts to shell companies.
Clearly this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, crime or corruption. The disregard for taxpayer money is appallingly consistent, and the leader of the NDP should be ashamed for not admitting his role in this boondoggle and apologize to Canadians for grandstanding on social media.
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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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- Feb/12/24 2:33:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's arrive scam app is not worth the cost or the corruption to Canadians. Today, the Auditor General informed us that the arrive scam app, which was supposed to cost $80,000, will now cost Canadians a minimum of $60 million. It gets worse. Due to documentation that the AG says was deleted or destroyed, it could be more than $60 million. She does not know who worked on the arrive scam app, if the work was fulfilled to requirements, or if it was even completed at all.
Why did the Prime Minister rig the process so that insiders get rich and taxpayers foot the bill?
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- Nov/20/23 3:10:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, one thing is clear: It has no respect for the Canadian taxpayer. GC Strategies, a two-person company working out of a basement, was paid $11 million to send messages on Linkedin to other companies to build the ArriveCAN app. The Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost.
Bureaucrats refused to say who signed the paper to hire GC Strategies for $11 million, so I am going to ask this of the Liberal caucus: Which Liberal minister paid $11 million to GC Strategies?
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- Nov/1/23 7:39:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the fine constituents of Calgary Midnapore, especially on such an important issue that truly affects their tax dollars.
I want members to take a moment and imagine a Lifetime movie that includes the elements of identity theft, forged resumes, contractual theft, fraudulent contracting and collusion. Members do not have to imagine this Lifetime movie, because it actually exists. It is the ordeal behind ArriveCAN.
ArriveCAN was created for $54 million. Experts have said that the app could have been created with simply $200,000 over a weekend. Instead, $54 million was spent on the app. Of that $54 million, $11.2 million went to a company called GCStrategies, and $4.3 million went to two companies called Coradix and DALIAN. I will add that these companies have actually received $80.3 million from the federal government over a significant period of time. It is very concerning that these companies would receive these large amounts of funding for the $54-million app.
Originally, this was an issue brought to the government operations committee last spring. I will say that the government tried to dismiss it. It tried to write it off as “nothing to see here”, and our objective at that time was just to try to get value for money for Canadians. As we have found out, it has become so much more than that. It has become a search for the truth. This was broken by The Globe and Mail's Bill Curry, when he broke the story of the RCMP's investigating this CBSA contract. The fact that GCStrategies, the group central to the creation of ArriveCAN, is the central player in the scandal leads to a lot of concerns.
The company at the centre of this is a small company called Botler. It originally did some work for the Justice Department. It was eventually reached out to by GCStrategies, the company at the centre of the ArriveCAN scandal, to do a pilot for Bill C-65, relative to sexual misconduct.
According to Curry's article:
The developers said they were first approached by GCStrategies's managing partner, Kristian Firth, via LinkedIn in late 2019. Mr. Firth said he was reaching out on behalf of his ‘client,’ who he later said was the CBSA's then-director, Cameron MacDonald.
[They said] they were shocked to discover that after interacting with GCStrategies and Mr. MacDonald for months, the funding for their software was approved through an agency contract with another company—Dalian—without their knowledge. They said they had never heard of Dalian at that time and never worked with any Dalian employees.
They said they later discovered that Coradix had submitted forms to the agency about their work experience without their knowledge or permission. For instance, [one of the employees] said a two-month summer internship at Deloitte on her résumé was inflated in an invoicing points form to say she had 51 months of experience working for [an] accounting firm. Years of experience is used in federal contracting to determine whether a contractor qualifies for [those positions]. It is also used to calculate per diem rates.
The story starts there, but it does not end there. GCStrategies' Mr. Firth also told these two employees of this company that:
...he could act as a broker to secure a contract with the agency. He also promised he could open doors for them to land contracts with other departments or have [their] software approved to use across the entire public service, which would be a substantial contract. He explained that he would do this for a fee that is contingent on successfully landing government contracts.
This company went on to record conversations with Mr. Firth. Those recorded conversations show Mr. MacDonald directed Botler in February 2020 to “‘please work with [Mr. Firth]’ and ‘let [Mr. Firth] work his magic.’”
“The conversations also reveal that Mr. Firth described Mr. MacDonald, in November, 2019, as a friend and said, 'I've been with him his whole career in government.' Mr. Firth referred to various senior public servants as friends.”
“They said they were asked by Mr. Firth to start working on the project even though they had yet to...sign a contract.” We get into the fraudulent contracting piece here. “For months, [the two employees] said they were repeatedly denied answers when they asked Mr. Firth for a contract so their legal team could review it.”
When called to appear last year before [the government operations committee] to answer questions related to ArriveCan, [the topic of discussion today], Mr. Firth said his company had invoiced $44-million in federal contract work with more than 20 different departments over the past two years. He said his company has no stand-alone office and just two employees—himself and Darren Anthony. Neither of them perform IT work themselves. Instead, they hire subcontractors to do the work in exchange for a fee of between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of the contract values.
Mr. MacDonald wrote, “You asked me for advice on the key question of ‘why GC Strategies’”, as the government was struggling to determine why GC Strategies was chosen. Mr. MacDonald himself said that they were still “grappling with 'who selected GC Strategies'”.
The article says, “Mr. MacDonald’s e-mail comments…suggested answers for the executives. The draft answers appeared aimed at convincing MPs that no one person was responsible for selecting [GS Strategies].” However, we know someone selected GC Strategies.
Mr. MacDonald “set up meetings for Botler with the Canada Revenue Agency, Correctional Service Canada, Global Affairs, Shared Services Canada, Transport Canada, Treasury Board and others in an effort to have the software approved as a government-wide project to all public servants.”
This is the crux of the concern for myself and my Conservative colleagues. When we are talking about ArriveCAN, it is a $54-million app, which, experts say, they could have done for $200,000. Here we have the company that received $11 million trying to arrange contracts across all of these other government departments.
“During this outreach, Mr. Firth introduced them to another consultant named Vaughn Brennan, who Mr. Firth said had extensive government connections in Ottawa. Mr. Brennan recommended that they send and e-mail to [the Deputy Prime Minister] from Mr. Dutt's e-mail account.”
In addition to the breadth of this fraud, we are concerned about the level at which individuals were complicit and informed.
“The contract for Botler to provide its services was not a direct contract between Botler and the border services agency. In fact, Botler's company name was not mentioned at all, nor was GC Strategies. Instead, the agency relied on a contract with Dalian and Coradix.”
“In a separate subcontracting document between Dalian and GC Strategies, which is not a direct contract with the government, GC Strategies is listed as a subcontractor to Dalian...along with an independent contractor named Patrick van Abbema—are listed as consultants.”
Unannounced to you as Coradix/Dalian were brought in as a pass through and they demanded 15% for doing so, CBSA were pissed at the overall pricing and threatened to pull the contract,” Mr. Firth wrote in an e-mail. “Your cost, plus 15% for me and 20% for Coradix etc, it rose to close to $500k. I was not prepared to slow the process down and stop our first client from purchasing so I removed myself from the equation completely and gave them a 15% discount.
“By September, 2021, Ms. Dutt and Mr. Morv [of Botler] had had enough and filed a formal misconduct complaint via the Sept. 27, 2021, e-mail to Mr. Utano and another agency official they had been dealing with.”
I will add this initial complaint was ignored, so they had to go on and do an additional complaint as well.
“They learned that the original contract through which their services were obtained was through an existing contract for IT services.”
“Like with ArriveCan, the border agency had turned to a general standing offer contract for IT services and added a specific request...”
“Through their research, [they] found that Dalian was submitting invoices and receiving payments...”
To summarize, in the words of Ms. Dutt:
This is about something that affects every single Canadian, every single taxpayer dollar that is taken from ... hardworking Canadians who are already struggling financially, that is given and spent through contractors through improper means. And I think that Canadians have a right to know what’s going on with their hard-earned money.
That—
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- Apr/24/23 2:34:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians want to file their tax returns, but they do not know when they are going to be processed or when they are going to receive their refunds. In addition, the Prime Minister spent 50% more on the bureaucracy, but Canadians are receiving poorer services, and just outside these doors, we have the largest public service strike in Canadian history.
When will the Prime Minister take responsibility for the price that Canadian taxpayers have to pay and end this strike?
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- Oct/18/22 3:00:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadian families can no longer afford the Liberal government. The average Canadian family now spends more on taxes than it does on the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter. The Prime Minister spent $12,000 of taxpayer money on groceries in a single month when Canadian families are skipping meals to pay their grocery bills.
When will the Prime Minister do the right thing and cancel the January 1 tax increase on Canadians' paycheques?
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- Sep/21/22 2:49:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the big difference is that we would leave money in Canadians' pockets. With rising inflation, Canadians cannot afford any more taxes. Paycheque taxes are heading toward an all-time high for Canadians. As of January 1, the paycheque taxes of a Canadian making $60,000 a year will have increased by almost $1,000 since the Liberal government took office.
Will the government listen to Canadians and cancel their planned tax increases on Canadians' paycheques?
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- Sep/21/22 2:48:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with basic essentials getting more and more expensive, Canadians continue to feel the crunch of sky-high inflation. Families are barely getting by, or worse, they are just hanging on, and the government is going to punish them further by raising their paycheque taxes on January 1.
Canadians simply cannot afford the Liberal government anymore, so will the government cancel its planned tax increases on Canadians' paycheques?
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- Mar/30/22 2:34:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government promises the moon and the stars, but it will take the shirts off the backs of Canadians to pay for it. It tempts Canadians with shiny things in the window, but it cannot cash the cheques it writes. The losers are everyday Canadians. They can drop off their kids at day care, but their tummies will be empty, and they better be in walking distance, because Canadians cannot afford gas.
Will the government find it in its heart to show one small act of compassion and axe the carbon tax?
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