44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 1, 2022 10:00AM
- 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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- 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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