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Mr. Mark Gerretsen (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Senate), Lib.)

Nov/1/22 11:52:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I understand that the NDP will be voting in favour of this motion. The first clause in the preamble says, “the cost of government is driving up the cost of living”. Could the member comment on what cost of government he thinks is driving up the cost of living?

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Mr. Gord Johns

Nov/1/22 11:52:37 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will just start with the government financing oil and gas. It makes these huge investments in industries that had $147 billion in profit last year, and here the government is subsidizing building the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is skyrocketing out of control. Outsourcing is built into this whole regime. It is a waste of taxpayers' dollars. It could all be going to help improve the lives of Canadians, so they could get access to medicine, housing and things they actually need to live.

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Mr. Denis Trudel (Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, BQ)

Nov/1/22 11:53:13 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very detailed and technical speech. He has done the research. I am always very pleased when my colleagues provide information that can help us in our debates. I thank him very much. The premise of the motion today is somewhat naive. The Conservatives are saying, for example, that had the government not spent $54 million on the ArriveCAN app, it would have helped fight inflation in Canada. It is $54 million nonetheless. This morning, we learned something really interesting in the news. As we suspected, Canada is the second-biggest investor in fossil fuels in the G20. It spends $8.5 billion a year. Right now, food banks do not have enough money. According to a survey, 20% of respondents stated that they are having smaller meals and just over 30% stated that they are eating less healthy meals because they are less expensive in Canada. Does my colleague not believe that this $8.5 billion invested in fossil fuels would be put to better use helping people here in Canada right now?

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Mr. Gord Johns

Nov/1/22 11:54:20 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, that fits the whole story, the whole regime of the Conservatives and the Liberals. It is about them bailing out their friends, whether it be big oil, big grocery or the big banks. This is what they do. They do not want to go after them and make them pay their fair share. Instead, they leave Canadians hung out to dry. This outsourcing that we are talking about today is again part of their history and story. It is about their friends, these expensive consultants who hire expensive consultants. The Conservatives started the Phoenix pay system. It was supposed to save over $80 million a year. It has cost $2.4 billion. The Liberals are not innocent, but they carried it on. They kept going with it. It needs to end. We are going to be here to stop it and to fight for the Auditor General to come in and look at this. It needs to change. We are going to stand up for Canadians and make sure that Canadians get the support they deserve.

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Mr. Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, NDP)

Nov/1/22 11:55:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is doing a fantastic job on government operations, looking for accountability and holding the government accountable. What reflections does the member have on the importance of having a whistle-blower regime? With that, when public sector employees find waste or any kind of malfeasance, they would have the ability to step forward and be protected so that they would not have reprisals in their workplace.

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Mr. Gord Johns

Nov/1/22 11:55:45 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, this needs a deep dive, and it needs support from all parties. We need to work collectively on this. Right now, there have been 18 complaints out of 500 that have come through and made it to the commissioner to look at. Not one has made it to the tribunal. This is not okay. It is actually impossible to imagine that not one whistle-blower complaint would have gone through to the tribunal and been supported—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Nov/1/22 11:56:13 a.m.
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Resuming debate, the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.

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Mr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC)

Nov/1/22 11:56:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for New Brunswick Southwest. It is important that we are all able to speak to this important issue today and have as many voices as possible. Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis and the cause was made right here in Canada. The $54-million arrive scam is one of a litany of examples of how the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. The more the current Prime Minister spends, the more Canadians are finding things cost. We are seeing higher prices. Canadians are very concerned as they get that first fill-up of home heating fuel, propane or oil, or their first natural gas bill. When they look at that they see taxes on taxes. They see the carbon tax on there and they are concerned. What are these bills going to look like when they get a fuel delivery in January? What is the government doing to help control the expenses that Canadians have? Is it committed to cutting taxes? No, it is raising taxes. Is it committed to getting its spending under control. No, it is not. Is it being accountable for the spending that it has undertaken? That is what we are doing today. We want accountability. We want an audit. An audit is something the government should be able to vote in favour of. When we look at what was spent and look at the public accounts, 40% of the deficit spending the current government undertook was not related to the pandemic. It will say the Conservatives voted in favour of helping people who needed help during the pandemic. We are not talking about that spending. We are talking about the waste, the excess and the insider deals, and there was an awful lot of that. If we can believe it, when we read the public accounts that were published last week, every single minute of last year the government incurred more than $170,000 of new debt. That is staggering. If two income earners in a family were each making $40,000 to provide a living for their family, they could not put a dent in one minute of the debt the current government racked up that year. It is unbelievable. Because of that, Canadians are going to pay higher prices for everything. We know they are paying higher prices for their homes. We know they are now going to pay higher prices for their mortgages, on the interest they pay, as well as on credit cards and lines of credit. We know that rent is going up to $2,600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver and to $2,300 a month for the same in Toronto. It is more important than ever that Canadians extract accountability from their government. For it to spend $54 million on this failed app is an egregious number, but I fear the number is much higher. We are hoping to find that out. It does not even know where all of that $54 million went. When members of the House asked the government for information, it came back and listed some of the contractors. However, there are tens of millions of dollars in subcontracts for which it is not willing to say who did the work or what work was done. Of the ones we do know, and the list was short, it claimed that it paid $1.2 million to a company that claims it did not do any of the work, nor did it get a penny for it. The government said that it was a mistake and that it was actually someone else. It is bizarre the government was so quickly able to say it made a mistake but did not know where the money actually went. When we are dealing in millions of Canadians' dollars, it is really important to know where we are sending the cheques. When it came to the support measures some Canadians needed, it was less careful. It sent cheques to prisoners, an an example, people convicted of crimes, and to people who did not need the help and who were gainfully employed, making great salaries with great benefits and great pensions. One needs to wonder why the Liberals were so cavalier with these particular millions. Did they go to someone with an inside connection? We have seen before that folks who appear on the Liberal list end up getting cushy order in council appointments and fat government contracts. I will remind the House of course that we saw a half-billion dollars try to get shovelled out the door to the Prime Minister's buddy at the WE organization, but Conservatives caught it. We saw when the Prime Minister was found to have broken ethics laws. He was happy to take a vacation to billionaire island, but we caught him. It is really about accountability. We found, through the work of members here and a referral to the Ethics Commissioner, that the Prime Minister had inappropriately interfered in the criminal prosecution of his buddies at SNC-Lavalin. This is another company that does quite well under the Liberals. Recently, while Canadians are facing this cost of living crisis, there is scrutiny about this $54-million boondoggle. I have talked to, face to face, dozens of CBSA officers, who signed up to protect our country and our borders and to interdict weapons smuggling, drugs and human trafficking, and they are getting asked to be IT support for an app that does not work. They did not find it enhanced their ability to keep Canadians safe. It slowed the lines down. It slowed the movement of people. They can look at a certificate. If the government demanded proof of vaccination, if that was its decision, misguided as it may have been, it could have done that and those customs officers could have verified those documents the same way they verify a passport, without a $54-million boondoggle with all kinds of pork to Liberal insiders. While that is going on, the Prime Minister jet-sets on one of his many travels and does it in style, of course, with a private taxpayer-funded jet and stays at the finest hotels and charges it to the taxpayer. One thinks he had to go to London and it was important he was there. What does one think a hotel room, one room, should cost for a night for a prime minister?

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Mr. Kevin Lamoureux

Nov/1/22 12:06:06 p.m.
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You tell me.

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Mr. Michael Barrett

Nov/1/22 12:06:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader asking how much I think it should be. I know it should not be $6,000 a night. The fact that these apologists are not demanding accountability speaks volumes, and that is why they are going to vote against this motion. I look forward to when the parliamentary secretary stands up in about 30 seconds and says he will call for accountability because he believes in transparency, but that is not what he is going to say. We know that because that is the pattern. They spend Canadians into the poorhouse. Canadians are lined up at food banks in record numbers, and what do these Liberals say? They say, “Let them eat cake.” We want accountability. That is exactly what we are going to get.

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Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

Nov/1/22 12:06:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I find it somewhat humorous at times when the member decides to take the track of character assassination and is talking about the costs and says, “it is a fact” and “let me give the member a fact, a real fact.” Stephen Harper, as prime minister, travelled to India. He spent a million dollars, not for him or for other people, but a million dollars to fly a car from Canada to India so he could have something to drive. Do they not realize there are vehicles in India? Really, it was a million Canadian tax dollars by former prime minister Stephen Harper. I am wondering if he could provide his thoughts on that stupid expenditure.

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Mr. Michael Barrett

Nov/1/22 12:07:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, well, stupid is as stupid does, as they say. When they are covering for a Prime Minister who claims that he is seized with a climate emergency but burns more jet fuel in a single vacation on his taxpayer-funded jet than a Canadian family spends in an entire year in its carbon footprint, we know that this is a very unserious government that is out of ideas. While it is out of ideas, Canadians are out of money, and they need accountability from the government. That is why we are here. That is what we are going to get.

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Mr. René Villemure (Trois-Rivières, BQ)

Nov/1/22 12:07:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very insightful comments. What does he think of the secrecy surrounding the ArriveCAN app and the fact that we have to search for and find answers and that this all seems to have been done in secret?

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Mr. Michael Barrett

Nov/1/22 12:08:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have asked for basic transparency from the government, and it wants to drag out document production for months. The information that it does provide is erroneous. While I would like to think that there is malice at play, it may very well just be incompetence, which is especially concerning when we are dealing with tens of millions of dollars. We are going to continue to ask for this level of transparency. Hopefully, with an independent audit, we will get the answers that the government is concealing from Canadians, which it is likely doing to protect the insiders who got rich.

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Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)

Nov/1/22 12:08:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, accountability is fundamental for all parliamentarians. However, and I do not want to challenge the member, I remember that he said that $500 million was shovelled out the door to the Kielburger organization. It was upward of $912 million without checks and balances. We simply asked what their capability of handling this program was and how it came about. That brought down the finance minister because we learned of this outrageous backroom connection between the Kielburger group and the minister. I want to ask my colleague this because he was on the committee. We never ended up finding out who owned all their companies, how many companies they had and how the money moved through their complex organizations. This was supposed to be a children's charity, yet the Parliament of Canada could not get to the bottom of this. Does my hon. colleague feel there are still unanswered questions about that attempted deal between the Liberals and the Kielburger brothers?

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Mr. Michael Barrett

Nov/1/22 12:09:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a big question for not a lot of time. As opposition parties, we worked very hard to try to get answers for Canadians, and there is still a need. If folks at CRA are watching, an audit or two is well overdue for those folks at WE Charity because, my goodness, there was a spider web of shell companies in an attempt to hide from transparency. We know that they hid witnesses and would not reveal documents. While it cost a finance minister his job, and we saw even more corruption, we still do not know all of the details. The government tried to give $912 million, nearly a billion dollars, to buddies of the Prime Minister. It is incredibly concerning. We do not have all of the information. We want to know what happened with those property sales in this company, which they said they were folding up. It is another great example of the accountability that Canadians deserve when the Liberal government is being cavalier with their tax dollars.

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Mr. John Williamson (New Brunswick Southwest, CPC)

Nov/1/22 12:11:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as the MP for New Brunswick Southwest, I know first-hand how harmful ArriveCAN was to the lives and livelihoods of Canadians. My riding in southwest New Brunswick borders the state of Maine, in the United States of America. We have five international crossings, and many of these border points do not really feel like we are dealing with a foreign, distant government. This is because these cross-border communities were actually in place long before Confederation. These communities, with Maine residents on one side and New Brunswick residents on the other, have long lived together and shared services, including emergency services and community activity. When the border was closed, it had a devastating impact, and ArriveCAN was a poor solution. There is a very good reason why the Auditor General should conduct a performance audit, including of the payments, contracts and subcontracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app, and good reason to prioritize that investigation. The ArriveCAN scam disrupted lives and family relations. It damaged the Canadian economy and infringed on mobility rights. We have discovered that it was a costly government boondoggle rolled out by the Liberal government, which seems incapable of governing any federal institution in the country. Whether it relates to passport offices, the CRA or social programs, this is a government that just cannot shoot straight. It cannot govern well and, as a result, costs are going up everywhere. This program, like many others, was a costly and unnecessary bureaucratic exercise. It was also heavy-handed and trampled over the guaranteed constitutional rights of Canadians. Millions were spent on a computer-based program and a mandate forcing all travellers, citizens and visitors alike, to register before entering Canada or, for citizens, coming home. Failing to do so could result in fines and/or a forced lock-up. Independent software developers tell us that this app could have been built for less than a quarter of a million dollars. That would have been $250,000. It could have been completed in a weekend, but not in Ottawa, and not under this government. Instead, the Liberals spent an eye-popping $54 million and paid out millions to Liberal consultants. Of course, the government will not tell us who received those payments or who got rich. My colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes spoke about the gross negligence that went toward the creation of the ArriveCAN scam. Regrettably, everything he said is true. The government said that one company was paid $1.2 million and then the company stood up and said that it had not received a dime. Where did that money go? The Auditor General needs to investigate this because the government is not coming clean with the Parliament. It is not coming clean with Canadians. This entire program is in desperate need of an audit, since Liberals will not tell the truth to Canadians. Canadians want to know what happened. Why was $54 million spent to control Canadians and strip away charter rights for a program that not only did not work but also was not necessary? The Liberals, of course, cannot get their stories straight. We need an investigation. We need an audit. Since the introduction of ArriveCAN and its subsequent mandatory use, I have been amazed by the lack of concern that the Liberal government has for the basic rights of Canadians. Anyone who is legally allowed to enter Canada, either as a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, under the Liberals, could now suddenly be denied re-entry into the country, through the threat of a fine of up to $5,000 and/or a 14-day quarantine because they did not register to come back into their own country. The government requiring citizens to register as a condition of coming home is not something that we see in democratic and free countries, yet the government thought nothing of this infringement. It was an infringement on charter rights, and there is no way around it or to explain away that citizens coming home could be fined for not following the government's rules. It was not just the invocation of the Emergencies Act that suspended civil liberties. ArriveCAN did the same to Canadians for a much longer time. Liberals believe theirs is the party of the charter, but this is difficult to square when we consider the actions they took while ArriveCAN was in place. It is difficult to measure the economic impact on the Canadian economy, especially on the tourism sector, but we know there was a cost, and one part of my riding is quite a revealing example. Many members have long heard me talk about Campobello Island, a unique island, which is in New Brunswick. The only way on or off that island, year round, is over a bridge to Lubec, Maine. This island has a population of only about 1,000 people, and it is especially popular with visitors from the United States because Campobello is home to the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. This was the summer home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the former American president, and his wife, Eleanor. It attracts tens of thousands of visitors from the United States every year in the summer, or at least it did before the Canada-U.S. border was closed, either because visitors were not allowed or because of the de facto closure with ArriveCAN. According to my discussions with CBSA officials, of the American motorists who crossed onto Campobello from the state of Maine, for every three cars that arrived, two were returned to the state of Maine because the U.S. visitors were either not aware of ArriveCAN or had not completed it. It is estimated that between 25% and 50% of those visitors who were sent back did not bother to complete the ArriveCAN, did not come into Canada and just returned to Maine to go elsewhere. I do not know if it was because of a lack of quality Internet in Lubec, because senior citizens are not familiar with apps and uploading medical documents or because these Americans just did not feel comfortable about uploading documents onto the database of a foreign country. However, if the Canadian government had been more reasonable from the start, it could have allowed CBSA officials to screen individuals at land crossings that enter our country and to do their jobs, but it did not. Instead, it was a bureaucratic mess. It caused hardship to Campobello. It caused hardship to tourist operators across New Brunswick, as well as across Canada, and as it is with everything else, the government failed its task to run the country in a way that does not penalize Canadians and working Canadians. Last week I was home in New Brunswick in Saint Andrews, after the Liberals had come back from a summer caucus meeting there, and I asked some of the operators how the season went. The answer was that it was great, once the Americans were allowed in at the end of the summer. It has an impact when we close the border and stopped allowing our American friends in. ArriveCAN was a costly and flawed program, and there are many questions for the Auditor General to look at. If ArriveCAN requires one to take a PCR test and schedules pickup by the government's testing supplier, why were so many rural homes in my riding completely ignored for pickup? Why did the government not contract this pickup service to Canada Post and the rural post office carriers, so rural homes could be serviced? How many PCR tests were left outside homes on doorsteps for pickup and never collected? Why were children, who were ineligible for COVID vaccines, forced into quarantine because of random selections? There are numerous questions the Auditor General should look at. If this motion passes, I intend to forward these questions to the Auditor General of Canada, and I hope the House votes to pass this, so we can get down and see what happened with the ArriveCAN scam.

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Mr. Ken Hardie (Fleetwood—Port Kells, Lib.)

Nov/1/22 12:21:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it would be nice if the Conservatives could square a few things and pick a lane, because early in the pandemic all we heard from the Conservatives was, “Close the border,” and, “Shut it down,” and then, once the vaccines became more readily available, they sided with the people who would be quite happy to have unvaccinated people spreading the virus back and forth across the American border. Where are they on this one? Do they not like ArriveCAN simply because it does what it does?

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Mr. John Williamson

Nov/1/22 12:22:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have heard this line of questioning from Liberal members before. It is typical, and they have forgotten a few important facts. When the Liberals were busy locking down Canadians, they kept the airports in this country open, and flights were coming in from around the world. They had it backwards. We should have been securing the borders, but they did not do that. We had airports across the country where provincial officials were rushing to try to test people, to try to determine what had happened. This government closed its eyes to the problems abroad and focused on Canadians and locking them down, and that is why the problem became as serious as it did as fast as it did. It was because of this government's neglect and not because of what Canadians were doing in their homes and communities across this country. Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Nov/1/22 12:23:03 p.m.
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Order. I have not called for questions and comments, and I would ask members to wait until I do that before they speak. Questions and comments, the hon. member for Jonquière.

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