Evidence of meeting #108 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contract.
A video is available from Parliament.
Partner, GC Strategies
Chris Jurewicz, I think, was the gentleman who owned the company.
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Okay. According to my notes, Mr. Anthony, you and Mr. White were all listed on the corporate info website. Was this company not registered prior to 2015?
Partner, GC Strategies
It was operating and doing other government contracts. Mr. Anthony, our other business partner and I, when we were a three-person team, were the ones who purchased it in 2015. Subsequently, after that, we applied to the CRA and PSPC to do an official name change, so that we could put our own brand to it.
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Okay. You also mentioned that you'd been working within contracts with the federal government since 2007. Would that be under your name as an individual, or another company's name, or...? If we were to search that information, what would we be searching?
Partner, GC Strategies
I used to work for a company called Veritaaq, which has been purchased by Experis Manpower. I was solely with those guys from 2007 until 2015.
Liberal
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Okay. I want to address what you said in your opening comments. You mentioned some of the ways this is impacting you personally, along with your family and your children. Certainly, that should never happen. I apologize for what's happening as far as your personal life is concerned. I'm not surprised, sadly, because of the rhetoric that's been used around this issue. We hear a lot of it in the House as well. Even for us as Liberal members on this committee, a lot of it is actually directed at us as well.
I'd really like to clear up some of the things we're hearing—for instance, that Liberal insiders got rich. I'd like to ask you this: Do you have any personal connections to the Prime Minister, to cabinet ministers or to any of the Liberal members of this committee?
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
The other big thing in the way it's characterized is that GC Strategies was a two-man operation in a basement that basically had, according to the Auditor General, $19 million. Essentially, it seems it's being portrayed as though cash was dumped on your lap in this-and-this amount of money. Really, that money flows through your contractors, your subcontractors. You mentioned the amount that you would have received personally.
I do have a question about the commission piece. It's cited often as a 15% to 30% commission. Can you account for this fluctuation? Is that a common thing?
Partner, GC Strategies
Yes. It all depends. I'll dumb it down and make it as boring as possible.
How it typically works is that you get an agreed rate to the client. Let's say it's $1,500 a day for your services. It's then on you, once that contract's been awarded, to try to find that resource. At that point, you negotiate their rate. If their rate is $1,000, you've now made 25%. If their rate is $1,200, you've now made x%. It all depends on what the negotiations are between what the rate is to the Crown and what the person you've found is charging. That delta in between is the margin.
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Great. That's very helpful.
You've addressed the Auditor General's report a bit. It's good to know that you were approached for comments around some of the numbers she was sharing. Were you approached by the procurement ombud prior to his writing his report?
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Do you feel that your input with the Auditor General was reflected?
Partner, GC Strategies
No. We commented on two parts. They were not included, nor really were our thoughts considered. One of the biggest ones was the $19.1 million. You'd understand what the uproar was going to be and how it was going to be used against you when CBSA officials had been stating that the number was closer to $12 million.
There are lots of reasons there could be discrepancies. I mean, we understand that the financial systems and the codes aren't the best at CBSA. Furthermore, the approximation and the valuation provided in the AG report was billing up until May 2023, whereas we previously gave numbers from the application build, which finished in July 2022. There's another year's worth of billing there, which may not have even been ArriveCAN. Again, no one knows if it's ArriveCAN or not because of how things were tagged internally.
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Okay. To the extent that you're aware, can you describe how the government may have tracked your performance on ArriveCAN contracts?
Partner, GC Strategies
There are quarterly reviews, quarterly reports, that we have to send in to PSPC that show burn rates. That essentially means how much of the resource is burning. Let's say a task authorization starts at $200,000. Each month you have to say how much of that resource is used up against that. It's not really performance; as I said, performance is done by an employee. We track the finances typically with PSPC to understand whether a task authorization is running out. Is a contract running out? Is it time to do renewals?
That's the extent of how we're monitored by the government organization. Everything else, such as project management and the budget, gets taken care of by them.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you very much. That is your time, I'm afraid.
Mrs. Vignola, go ahead for two and a half minutes, please.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Firth, earlier when we talked about the COVID Alert app, you mentioned that you had been contacted by a Canadian Digital Service official who had heard about you. Did that official tell you who had given them your name?
Partner, GC Strategies
No, he did not. It was more a case of, “We understand the work you're doing on ArriveCAN.” That's kind of how the introduction started.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
All right.
Basically, the Public Health Agency of Canada, or PHAC, was the one overseeing the COVID Alert app. Someone you knew well and with whom you had worked on COVID Alert had previously moved to PHAC after winning a competition for a new position there. That's why I asked you about the referral. Thank you.
You said that the errors the Auditor General flagged may be due to the codes used by the Canada Border Services Agency, or CBSA, since the codes aren't always clear. Do you think a major cleanup of the CBSA's procurement practices is needed, to provide clarity around the codes and ensure that transparent government really is transparent? Do you think the information would then be a lot clearer to the public and to us, the politicians?
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
You don't have any comments on that, even though you, yourself, said that the unclear coding had a number of extremely negative consequences for you.
Partner, GC Strategies
I don't have access to the codes. All I have access to are the reporting and the numbers, which are completely contradictory to what I have.
Again, I have the luxury of speaking to every one of the hundred consultants we put through during the pandemic to get a true understanding of their level of effort for what they were working on and what they were doing. If you were coming in as an auditor general, you would not have access to the detail that I currently have, but you'd have access to calculating task authorizations. The truth there as well is that not all task authorizations are fully utilized. You may see one for $200,000, but only $120,000 was actually used on that task authorization. This is, again, where these inflated numbers can come from, because there's just not the financial system in place that can do real-time health checks.
Conservative