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.
