- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $133,355.09
- Government Page
- Apr/17/24 3:50:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is not an answer to the question I asked.
Does Mr. Firth have any knowledge of or involvement in the reviews for the ArriveCAN app on either the Apple store or the Google Play store being artificially amplified or paid for, any knowledge at all?
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- Feb/27/24 1:35:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is incredibly disappointing that the Bloc took the opportunity more than a half-dozen times to vote to increase the funding to this scandal-plagued arrive scam app. It is so frustrating for Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet.
When the Conservatives were in government, there was no $60 million arrive scam. Spending on outside consultants was less than half of what it has ballooned to, at more than $21 billion under the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, who is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption.
As I said, it was not like that before these Liberals and it will not be like that after them.
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- Feb/26/24 6:14:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, a two-person firm working out of a basement in suburban Ottawa was getting $258 million in contracts from the Liberal government, starting mere weeks after it was elected. This has been reported in La Presse and elsewhere. On the arrive scam, of course, this same company got $20 million.
The parliamentary secretary talks about taking action. What happened to ministerial accountability? Who is in charge over there? Conservatives have put forward a very clear plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
While the Liberals are firefighting on the other side of the House, they are not tending to the most basic responsibility to Canadians, which is their fiduciary responsibility. Canadians are lined up at food banks, struggling to get by, and the Liberals are lining the pockets of insiders. Their friends in the cover-up coalition, the NDP, are voting with them every step of the way.
Canadians want to know this: Why will the Liberal government not put Canadians first instead of its own friends?
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- Feb/12/24 2:32:28 p.m.
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Canadians want and expect us to ascribe responsibility to the individual responsible, and that is the Prime Minister. This app was supposed to cost $80,000. It cost more than $60 million. It has been under RCMP investigation and investigation by the procurement ombud and the Auditor General, and the results so far are damning for the government. It has lined the pockets of insiders while Canadians are lined up at food banks. It is absolutely unacceptable that the cost overruns have seen $20 million go to a company that did absolutely no work on the app.
Why is the government putting its friends ahead while Canadians suffer?
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- Feb/12/24 2:31:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's arrive scam app was supposed to cost taxpayers $80,000, but it was confirmed by the Auditor General that it in fact cost more than $60 million. After eight years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister, we know that he is not worth the cost. He is definitely not worth the corruption.
This process was so corrupt that his favourite company of two guys in a basement, GC Strategies, got to write the contract for themselves, to the exclusion of everybody else. We know they did no IT work, and that has been confirmed, but they got $20 million for their trouble.
Will the Prime Minister just admit that he is lining the pockets of insiders at the expense of Canadians?
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- Oct/21/22 11:41:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, what Canadians do not find helpful is that the Liberals have no intention of telling the truth, so here are some facts for them.
They said the app would cost $80,000, and it ended up costing $54 million. Then CBSA and the Liberals, the ministers, signed off on payments, saying that companies like ThinkOn Inc. and Ernst & Young received payments from the government. These companies never received a dime, so money is missing.
I have two questions for the Liberals: Who is lying, and who got rich?
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- Jun/9/23 11:32:27 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if they took democratic institutions seriously, they would respect the will of the democratically elected people in this House, who voted three times for a public inquiry. Instead, they wanted a Liberal solution to a Liberal problem. That is why they appointed a member of the Trudeau Foundation, who then hired some Liberals to help him out. When he thought he was in a conflict of interest, he asked another member of the Trudeau Foundation to say that he was not. Now we learn, of course, that he and the person he was supposed to be investigating were both getting advice from the same firm.
It is levels of conflict of interest with the Liberals. Canadians have had enough. A majority of them want a public inquiry. Will the Prime Minister finally call one today?
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- Jun/2/23 1:35:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I logged into the app. It did not work. I would like to register my vote as no.
It was a technical issue.
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- May/29/23 2:37:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister appointed a family friend and Trudeau Foundation member to investigate, more like cover up, foreign interference by Beijing in our democracy. That family friend then appointed another Trudeau Foundation member to supposedly clear them of their conflict of interest, and then hired a lifetime Liberal donor to work for them. This has been a sham from the very beginning. Canadians do not have confidence in this process.
That is why they want a public inquiry, and that is why that was what was passed in the House. Will the Prime Minister call one today?
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- Apr/20/23 2:48:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, for eight years, the Liberals have repeatedly broken ethics laws: the Prime Minister caught breaking ethics laws twice, the trade minister, the intergovernmental affairs minister and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister.
They got so sick of getting found guilty that they appointed the sister-in-law of the intergovernmental affairs minister to be the new Ethics Commissioner. The only problem is that they got caught and so she resigned. Will the Prime Minister stand today and assure Canadians that he is not going to appoint any more friends, family or Trudeau Foundation members to this important position?
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- Apr/19/23 4:04:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to inform the House that the interim Ethics Commissioner has resigned that role, effective today.
As a result, there are decisions that the office cannot proceed with, which are based upon functions that only the commissioner can undertake. After the politicization of that role by the Liberal government, the office remains paralyzed.
The official opposition invites the government to meaningfully consult with recognized parties on an appointee whose appointment avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
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- Mar/30/23 2:38:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Prime Minister and his gang of serial lawbreakers were told by the outgoing Ethics Commissioner to take remedial ethics training. Instead, at Sunday brunch, the Liberal cabinet minister turned to his sister-in-law and said, “How about we make you the new Ethics Commissioner?”
When are the Liberals going to take their responsibilities seriously and appoint someone who is independent and can restore accountability to this place for all Canadians?
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- Mar/20/23 6:02:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the problem is that Canadians are going to question the appointee because the Prime Minister has said that this individual is a close friend of his. The problem is that the appointee sits on a foundation that has the same name as the Prime Minister.
It is the appearance of the conflict of interest that is going to cause Canadians to doubt the integrity of that process. It taints everything downstream from it.
That is why an independent, transparent public inquiry is important, and that is why we need to hear from Katie Telford at committee.
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- Oct/20/22 3:02:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we heard some responses from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety, but we did not get an answer.
This is very clear. The Liberals said the app was going to cost $80,000, and then they said they gave this company $1.2 million out of a total $54 million in this boondoggle. The company they say they gave $1.2 million to said they were not given a dime.
We asked who got rich and the Liberals do not know the answer. Here is a new question for them: Who is lying?
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- Oct/20/22 2:58:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, CBSA is concerned and Canadians are concerned because the Prime Minister's scandal-plagued record speaks for itself. This app, when it started out, was supposed to cost $80,000 and the expenses ballooned to more than $54 million. It wrongly quarantined and forced into house arrest 10,000 Canadians.
It is a boondoggle. It is a failed app. The government lost $1.2 million. Who got rich?
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- Oct/19/22 8:16:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it cost $54 million at a time when Canadians are facing record food price inflation. Conservatives are asking, “Who got rich?” Where did the $54 million that was spent on the failed ArriveCAN app go?
We heard from some members of the government that they believe this app was responsible for saving tens of thousands of lives. I can tell members what that app did to at least 10,000 people, which was to put them wrongly under house arrest, in a forced quarantine, in spite of their compliance with public health guidelines in Canada. This $54-million app was built by one web designer while he was having his turkey dinner over a weekend, and tech experts saying the upset limit they would have given to an application like this would have been in the low seven figures, if they exceeded a quarter of a million dollars.
When we raised this issue of this $54-million app with an unknown number of subcontractors, whose identities the government refuses to reveal, the Prime Minister said that $54 million was just petty. He is not worried about $54 million at a time when Canadians are having to choose between nutritious food for their children and putting gas in their vehicles to get to work. They are just dreading the day they know they are going to need to turn the thermostat on as the mercury plunges.
It was $54 million. We could heat a lot of homes and feed a lot of families with that kind of cash, but we heard that it was petty. We disagree. What we want from the government is transparency. It has rescinded the mandatory use of this app, for now, but still left in place seven figures of fines for Canadians who used an app we know did not work correctly. We know we saw thousands of people punished because of errors in what is one of the most expensive apps going.
We saw the wonderful app reviews ArriveCAN had in the App Store, so one wonders how much of that money went to pay for fake reviews for an app that was, by most accounts, terrible and demonstrably unjustified.
What we are looking for from the government is not the assertion by the Prime Minister that $54 million is a petty sum of money. What we are looking for is transparency. We are looking for the names of the vendors and details of the services they provided for $54 million. Canadians deserve that kind of transparency. If we are going to ask Canadians to have confidence in their institutions, to be able to trust government, then the government needs to do the right thing and be transparent.
Will the parliamentary secretary stand today and commit to providing Canadians with the details of those contracts? Who got rich?
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- Oct/6/22 6:37:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have heard the government's rationale for its implementation of the app before, but what we have not heard is an admission that it continued to use the app solely for political considerations. We have even had members of the Liberal caucus say that last year, in the election the Prime Minister called during the pandemic, he used it as an opportunity to stigmatize and divide Canadians. This is not what Canadians need from their government.
Now we are in a time when Canadians want to recover from the two years that we have had. They are experiencing very hard times financially because we have this made-in-Canada Liberal inflationary crisis, and they want to hear from the government, frankly, that it is going to atone for what it has done, that it is going to cancel those fines and that it is going to commit to Canadians that it is not going to take these kinds of coercive measures again. It needs to come clean with Canadians about why it has spent twice as much on this ArriveCAN app than it told them it would, and be transparent about all the contracting around it. We are looking for honesty, transparency and integrity.
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