- 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
- Apr/8/24 1:34:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House on behalf of the good citizens of Calgary Midnapore.
Who is Kristian Firth? Kristian Firth is an individual who is at the centre of this debate here today, an individual who has been called, in contempt of this Parliament, to come and to make amends by providing information that he has not provided to committees, to this House and to Canadians.
Who, really, is Kristian Firth? Kristian Firth is one half of a company called GC Strategies that in 2018 ranked fourth of the fastest-growing companies in Ottawa. The products it offers are IT solutions and consulting. It had a three-year revenue growth of 676.4%. It is no wonder why when we see the scandal of the arrive scam app, a $60 million app that could have been created at a fraction of the price by a group of university students over a weekend.
This individual is wanted here, before the House, for not getting answers for Canadians. I am sure when Mr. Firth started his enterprise, he was like any other well-meaning entrepreneur who wanted to make a dollar to support his family. He has cited incredible stress since he undertook this role, with the scrutiny that he and his partner have come under.
Before I continue, I just want to point out that I will be sharing my time with the wonderful member for Edmonton West, who is also the chair of the government operations committee.
The things Mr. Firth did were certainly unscrupulous. For example, he falsified résumés. He essentially did what we have come to know in the government operations committee as the “bait-and-switch”, where a certain set of information is provided, a contract is won, and then the vendors are switched out, and those individuals who would be completing the work are switched out. He certainly inflated the prices. He has made $19 million on arrive scam, an unbelievable amount. As I said, it was a $60 million app, but it may in fact be even more than that. The Auditor General was not even able to confirm that it was just $60 million, as a result of incomplete documentation. In addition to the bait-and-switch, the falsified résumés and the inflated prices, he made relationships with bureaucrats that many would consider not above bar and, in fact, subject to strong ethical scrutiny.
Kristian Firth is an individual, one partner in GC Strategies, who started a business, who got $19 million in funding for arrive scam, who has now been called in contempt of the House and who has done some extraordinary things. Why is Mr. Kristian Firth being called before the House?
It is evident that it is the incompetence and the unethical conduct of the Liberal government. Without a doubt, that is the real reason Kristian Firth is being called in front of the House. The current government is incapable of taking responsibility for anything it does. It simply cannot say it is the government's fault. Sadly, it is a combination of incompetence and unethical behaviour. It is incompetence that it has had eight years to fix the procurement policy, which the procurement ombudsman said was an absolute shame, an absolute failure, and it allowed this scandal to happen.
It is an ethical breach, as we have seen at every single layer and level of the Liberal government, to the Prime Minister, three times, with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. It is no wonder that Kristian Firth thought he could get away with those types of atrocities and that he is being called forward to the House.
We have seen several instances where the current government has not taken its responsibility seriously, or at all, with dismal results and with terrible consequences for Canadians and, in fact, for members of its own party as well.
We recall Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister, who tried to do the ethical thing with the Liberal government. When shuffled out of her position as minister of justice and given the lesser cabinet position of minister of veterans affairs, she later told Canadians that the Prime Minister's Office had attempted to put pressure on her to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case. We see that no one has a chance with the current government, not even the justice minister. In a letter, Ms. Wilson-Raybould later thanked constituents, saying she was stepping down from cabinet and looking forward to serving her constituents at that time. However, in her book, she later on came out and said, “I wish...I had never met you.” Those are the words she said about the Prime Minister, who leads the unethical government, who leads an incompetent government that has brought us to this position with Kristian Firth having to come in front of the government here today. In fact, on her way out, Ms. Wilson-Raybould said to the incoming justice minister, David Lametti, “Be careful, all is not what it seems.”
As I said, it is a government that does not want to take responsibility and does not want to have accountability. We see this again with the calling of Kristian Firth. Where else did we see this? We are seeing it with the dismissal of the two lab scientists out of the Winnipeg lab where we had, first of all, a CSIS investigation that showed information such as an X-ray of a package containing vials of a substance that was later found to be mouse protein, but they were labelled as kitchen utensils. As well, there was a trip to China that was a personal vacation. Even a CSIS investigation was not enough for the Prime Minister to insist that all the documents be released around that scandal. That is another another example where we see how the current government does not take responsibility.
It is unethical and does not even have the competence to right the wrongs it makes. It has no capacity to fix this policy, even though it has had eight years. It has no capacity to follow the recommendations of independent investigators of Parliament such as the procurement ombudsman or even the Privacy Commissioner, as we saw in the government operations committee this morning.
Worse than incompetent, the government is unethical. It attempts to cover up its unethical behaviour and to place the blame on other individuals, as the Prime Minister did with the former minister of justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould; as he did with the former parliamentary secretary to international development, Celina Caesar-Chavannes; and as he did with Jane Philpott, and the list goes on and on. Do members see former minister Lametti in the House today? No. He was lucky; he jumped off the bus before he could get run over. That is what the Liberal government does. That is what the unethical government does.
Where else did we see this? If we look at the chair you are sitting in, Madam Speaker, it is the chair of the Speaker. The Prime Minister could not even accept responsibility for inviting a Nazi into the House. Instead, he got rid of the predecessor to that chair.
The government is incompetent and unethical. It cannot take responsibility for anything. It throws everyone and anyone under the bus, and this is the latest victim. It is certainly as a result of his own doing and of his own terrible inaction of not responding to the House. However, it is the Prime Minister who throws those people under the bus. Who perpetuates these lies? In fact, it is the Prime Minister and all the ministers around him. It is all the ministers who showed up in the government operations committee and indicated that they did not know how this happened. It is their deputy ministers. It is Erin O'Gorman, who is just there covering up for the unethical government.
Do members know what makes me the most mad? My colleagues and I, in the next government, after the next election, will have to fix this pattern of unethical behaviour and have to fix all the policies. It is the member for Edmonton West, the member for Barrie, the member for Calgary West and the member behind me for Sarnia—Lambton, who are going to have to come in and clean up this mess.
That is because even though it may be Kristian Firth who is coming to the bar today, in contempt, for refusing to provide answers, it is fundamentally the responsibility, the fault and the blame of the unethical Prime Minister and of the incompetent Liberal government. Frankly, Kristian Firth is just the latest victim in this train wreck in this parade of victims of the Prime Minister and his team.
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- Mar/21/24 3:05:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, scandal runs rampant in the Liberal-NDP government. We all know about ArriveCAN and now we know about another $5 million in fraudulent billing. To make matters worse, the billing is across 36 departments and dates back to 2018, pre-pandemic. This is only the first wave of even more fraudulent billing cases. The Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Could the minister answer one simple question: How many millions of dollars in fraudulent billing did arrive scam cost Canadians?
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- Feb/27/24 3:06:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, even the Auditor General said that a crisis situation is no excuse for this lack of value for money for Canadians. Conservatives have today put forward a motion, related to arrive scam, to get money back from the contractors who did no actual work. There is one person in this chamber who can make that decision: the Prime Minister. He has the power to make the decision to get the money back for hard-working Canadians.
Will the Prime Minister commit today to getting the money back for Canadians, or will he shirk his responsibility, as he usually does?
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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 1:51:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it has been pointed out that the NDP voted with its Liberal coalition partners a minimum of eight times to secure the funding for arrive scam.
I will also point out that this member in particular is guilty of this, because he entirely conspired with the Liberal government to obstruct documentation in our McKinsey study last year. He can say what he wants, but he has been completely complicit with this Liberal partner.
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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/12/24 2:35:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, every word I say is true, and the member knows it.
The Prime Minister's arrive scam app is not worth the cost or the corruption. Contractors were paid over $1,000 a day, even though 18% of the invoices for these contracts had no supporting documentation, so we do not even know if the contractors completed the work.
GC Strategies pocketed almost $20 million and yet completed no work itself, and it gets worse: It wrote the requirements for the $25-million contract it won.
I have a simple question for the Prime Minister: How is he going to get our money back?
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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/1/23 7:53:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is a very good question. I am actually shocked when I walk through airports and see the arrive scam signage still there. Given the information we have received, which is a result of good investigation by the Conservative caucus, as well as Bill Curry at The Globe and Mail, one would think that the government would be in a pretty big hurry to conceal this, to wrap this up and to not put it in the faces of Canadian voyagers, to the point of my colleague from the Bloc.
That is a very good question. ArriveCAN now serves as the flagship of monetary and fiscal scandal within the current government. It will go down in history as more than just a failed application, but as the tip of the iceberg and as the canary in the coal mine of scandal and corruption within the current government.
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