SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 253 - Nov/22/23

Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)

Nov/22/23 7:42:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am here to speak on the arrive scam. However, in a brief coda to the previous debate, the NDP House leader was talking about the importance of supporting Ukraine, trying to wrap himself in blue and yellow. It is important to tell the House that the NDP has consistently opposed giving Ukraine the weapons it needs. In fact, I will quote from the member for Edmonton Strathcona, the NDP foreign affairs critic, who said, last February at committee: Some people in this committee and some members of our Parliament have been calling on the government to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine. I have some concerns about that, obviously. Do you believe there are risks—

118 words

Context: House Hansard - 253 - Nov/22/23

Mr. Garnett Genuis

Nov/22/23 7:43:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was simply reading a quote, which I think is on the record, that showed the NDP speaking out against giving lethal weapons to Ukraine. Ukraine needs weapons. I will speak now about the arrive scam app, which is a grotesque scandal that I think many Canadians are seized with. It is actually more like a family of scandals; it is a number of different scandals that are interrelated. The government spent $54 million developing an app, which is far in excess of what it had spent on apps before. It spent $54 million developing a glitchy app that did not work and that sent many Canadians into quarantine who should not have been in quarantine. In the process, the government hired not a major company or a company with IT expertise. Rather, it hired GC Strategies, a company of two people working out of their basement and who did no IT work. They simply subcontracted all of the actual work. That would be like the Speaker's hiring me to paint her fence for $100, my then hiring the member for Winnipeg North to paint the fence for $20, and my pocketing $80. He did all the work, and the Speaker was sort of fine with that arrangement. That is what happened consistently. I think Canadians have a grave problem with why the two-person company that did nothing got all the work. The RCMP is now investigating the contractors. Meanwhile, there is an admission that fraudulent resumes were submitted to the Government of Canada by GC Strategies, and there are senior public servants accusing each other of lying about who is responsible for the choice to hire GC Strategies. We need an answer from the government on this, because we have tried to ask senior public servants, and they have accused each other. They have said, “It wasn't me; he chose GC” and “No, someone else chose GC Strategies.” One can understand why nobody wants to take credit for the decision, given the fact that a company with no IT experience and that did no work was hired. The government needs to explain, because it was a decision made by the Government of Canada. In the midst of these structural problems about contracting, fraudulent resumes and public servants accusing each other of lying, will the government finally tell us who is responsible for choosing GC Strategies for ArriveCAN?

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Context: House Hansard - 253 - Nov/22/23

Mr. Garnett Genuis

Nov/22/23 7:47:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that great fog of a non-response obviously gets nowhere close to the question I asked. I will repeat it. We have the arrive scam scandal: $54 million that was spent on an app that should have cost much, much less. Money was spent through a company that did no IT work and subcontracted all of the actual work. We need to know who is responsible. Who made the choice to hire GC Strategies? There are senior public servants, Cameron MacDonald and Minh Doan, accusing each other of lying about who is responsible. Somebody has to be responsible. The government made the decision to give the money to GC Strategies for the arrive scam app. It is a simple question: Who was responsible for the decision to hire GC Strategies for the ArriveCAN app? Finally, to the parliamentary secretary, who was the person responsible for hiring GC Strategies?

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