- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Dufferin—Caledon
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $136,309.03
- Government Page
- Oct/18/23 5:30:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is what is important to look at: The arrive scam app was not just studied at the international trade committee, which is the subject of the report in the motion we are debating today. This was actually studied several times. It was studied at OGGO, which had a bunch of meetings, on October 20, November 14, November 17 and December 8, 2022. This is in addition to all the meetings that we had at the international trade committee.
I am sure members and all Canadians are wondering where I am going with this and why I am bringing these dates and other things up. It is because government officials came and testified at committee about this app on many occasions. They came to the OGGO committee on November 14 and October 20, 2022. We also had government officials from CBSA at the international trade committee.
Why is that relevant? It is relevant because it looks as though there was some pretty nefarious business going on with the development of this app. This was first reported to CBSA in September 2021 by the founders of a small, Montreal-based software company, who said that there was something rotten in Denmark.
At all these meetings, we had government officials who came to testify from public works, CBSA, Shared Services, Public Safety, customs and immigration, and the Treasury Board Secretariat. At all these meetings, the nefarious goings-on with the contract for the arrive scam app was never raised. It is unbelievable. Everyone knew there was a problem.
One may say that this was September 2021, so that maybe did not apply. It was a long time ago. They forgot about it and did not take it seriously, but they then submitted another report to the government with their concerns in November 2022. These meetings kept going on, and not once did the government raise this. In fact, we now know that when the Auditor General was looking into this, the government did not even let the Auditor General know that the contracting surrounding this app was not being looked into.
This is a typical Liberal cover-up. What is terrible is that this is not the first time. We could say that the first time the Liberal government made a mistake and did not disclose something, we could perhaps give it a pass. However, the Liberal government has engaged in this kind of corruption on a repeated and continual basis. We can go all the way back to the adscam, where there were bags of money being exchanged, and there was a public inquiry into it.
I would think that the Liberal Party and Liberal governments had learned that this is not the way to conduct business. However, in fact, this corruption continued. We only have to look at what has come up with McKinsey, SNC-Lavalin and the WE Charity.
We now have an extraordinarily long and wide track record of the Liberal government engaging in purchasing the agreements to develop this app in a way that appears to be criminal in nature. This is extraordinarily damning for the government. Once again, it chose not to follow the proper path but to go down a road of corruption. What makes it worse is that, in the course of studying this app, we heard a litany of witnesses at the international trade committee who said how terribly the app worked.
Even when it engaged in this kind of corrupt activity in the procurement of this technology, it did it in such an incompetent way that the app was way over budget. We heard that there were app developers who said they could develop it for a couple of million dollars. The government paid $54 million for an app that did not even work.
The backups at the border were unbelievable as people tried to use this app, and this happened over and over again with absolutely no compassion from the government. People who could not fill it in were given no compassion from the government. They were sometimes sent to quarantine hotels. We know what the bills for those quarantine hotels were. We know how people were treated in those quarantine hotels.
The arrive scam app is an unmitigated disaster from corrupt conception all the way through implementation to where we are today. It would appear that the government has not learned a single lesson about that because it failed to disclose an ongoing criminal investigation by the RCMP with respect to this app. The Liberals did not disclose it ever at committee. They did not disclose it to the Auditor General. Why was that? It is because the government has a track record and a history of trying to not disclose things.
This has also been published in a story by The Globe and Mail on October 3 or 4. What I am waiting for is for the Prime Minister to say once again that the story in The Globe and Mail is false.
Members can remember when that happened when we were dealing with the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the story broke about how badly Jody Wilson-Raybould was treated by the Liberal government as she tried to do the honourable thing and be a whistle-blower. The Prime Minister said that the story in The Globe and Mail was false, except it turned out that the story in The Globe and Mail was one hundred per cent true.
Therefore, I would suggest that the story we have in The Globe and Mail about more Liberal corruption and more Liberal cover-ups is absolutely true. What a disappointing day this is for Canada.
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Madam Speaker, it is amazing that all of this was predicted. The affordability crisis we find ourselves in, runaway inflation and high interest rates were all predicted by the Conservative leader.
It is actually a shocking amount of spending. The federal government, under this NDP-Liberal coalition, now spends $176 billion per year every year more than in 2015. I hear from constituents when they raise that issue, and I ask, “What in your life is better?” No one can answer that. All of this spending has really driven the affordability crisis and has not helped the vast majority of Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, I am happy to speak to the fall economic update.
“Canadians have never had it so good,” is the message we get when we listen to Liberal members talk about what is going on in Canada. They say things are great, that Canadians should be grateful for everything that is going so wonderfully here in this country. They talk about how it is so wonderful because of all the money they have spent. The answer to every problem in Canada, if one is a Liberal, is to spend money. That is the solution, so spend they have.
The Liberals have doubled the national debt. The amount of debt of every prime minister up to the current Prime Minister, the Liberals have doubled. Every prime minister before accumulated a certain amount of debt, and the current Prime Minister and government doubled it in a few short years. They say that as a result of that, things are great.
Maybe we should talk about how great things are as a result of all this spending. First of all, we just heard from the Auditor General that a lot of the spending did not really go anywhere that it should have. There were $4.6 billion in confirmed overpayments during the pandemic and $27 billion in suspicious payments, so we are looking at $32 billion of money that went who knows where, not where it should have gone. This includes the fact that 1,500 people in jail received these benefits.
To this point, there is absolutely no real plan to get any of this money back. Liberals say they are working on it and the wheels are in motion, when they are not saying the Auditor General was pushed into making this report by the opposition and trying to undermine the Auditor General. It is an interesting position for a government to take, when it appointed the Auditor General.
We look at all that spending and at the issues across the country from coast to coast to coast. Many members have been rising in this chamber to talk about the issues in hospitals all across the country. The premiers have said the federal government should be transferring more money to the provinces for health care, and the government is saying that the cupboard is kind of bare.
I am thinking that $32 billion, if it had been properly managed, would therefore have been available for health transfers, but that ship has sailed and the government is doing virtually nothing to get that money back.
There is $27 billion a year now being paid in interest on the debt, which has doubled over the course of the last number of years under the Liberal government. That is $27 billion every year that could be spent on things like health care. Right away, if we put those things together, one year of the massive interest on the massive debt plus the $32 billion spent on who knows what, and we would have over $50 billion for health care.
There are some hospitals and some provinces across the country that would very much be interested in receiving some of that money, but of course they cannot, because the Liberals have spent it on other things.
The interest on the debt is actually going to go to $43 billion a year by 2026. Let us think about that number. It is staggering: $43 billion a year simply to pay interest on the credit card.
When one raises issues like this, the government says it spent so Canadians did not need to spend. Well, Canadians are spending now, through their taxes, paying $27 billion a year in interest, which is moving to $46 billion. However, that is okay, because everything in this country is fantastic. Canadians have never had it so good.
Right now, inflation is at a 40-year high. People in this country are having to choose to eat or to heat their homes, but Canadians have never had it so good.
In one month, 1.5 million Canadians used a food bank. It is unprecedented. The struggle of Canadians after seven years of spending by the government is worse than it has ever been, so the rationale that we have spent all this money and things are great is completely debunked, because things are not great.
There are so many Canadians who are within a few hundred dollars of not being able to make ends meet, and inflation is eating into that every single day, but, right, everything is great. The money was spent to make the lives of Canadians better, except that their lives are not better. By virtually every measurable index, the lives of Canadians now are worse than they were 10 years ago.
There is no apology from the government on this. It will say things like, “Yes, but we are going to pay this benefit here or this little benefit there.”
When a person is $200 away from not being able to make ends meet, a one-time payment of $500 is not going to help. It might get them through the first couple of months, but there are 10 other months in the year in which we have to try to make ends meet.
One in five Canadians are skipping meals, but all this spending was so great for Canadians.
The result of the economic policies of the government has been to impoverish the nation, and that is where we are when we look at all the statistics that are adding up.
There is absolutely no recognition of this by the government. There is no apology for it. It simply says, “We have this little program here. We have another program here. That is all Canadians need.”
The other glaring omission from the government has been any meaningful response to the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. It is a transformational document on how the United States is going to have its economy move going forward. No, we cannot match, dollar for dollar, the kinds of programs the United States is offering, but it offers these things in very clear ways. It offers tax incentives for governments. It offers production incentives for businesses.
What we are being promised here in Canada are programs. There is going to be a program here that a business can apply for, an opaque program. At committee, we heard industry representatives say that these programs are given according to a naughty list and a nice list. If one is on the naughty list, one has no idea why one is on the naughty list, and one does not get the funding.
When the government is picking winners and losers in business, everyone loses. The response is not sufficient, and the response it is offering is not going to help Canadian businesses.
We have heard over and over again from witnesses that this is a game-changer in the United States and that the government needs to act quickly. Well, my definition of “quickly” is not waiting for the budget in two, three or four months to announce some measures, sprinkling a couple of things here in the update and then saying to businesses, “Do not worry. Everything is going to be fine when the budget is released.”
Businesses cannot wait three, four, five, six or seven months. Investments are happening in the United States right now.
The government has impoverished Canadians over the last number of years, and now it risks losing out on the manufacturing bonanza for electric vehicles, etc., that is coming, because it is just acting so slowly.
This is an update that we cannot support and Canadians cannot afford.
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