Government Operations Committee on Oct. 26th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Good afternoon. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome, everyone, to meeting number 81 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, October 17, 2022, the committee is meeting on the study of the ArriveCAN app.

As a reminder, keep your microphones away from the earpieces, as it causes feedback and potential injury to our valued translators.

I will remind you that, today, we have an absolute hard cap at 5:45 p.m. and not a moment after, colleagues.

We're going to start with statements from our witnesses, Ms. Dutt and Mr. Morv.

Ms. Dutt, please go ahead for five minutes.

[Ritika Dutt, Chief Executive Officer, Botler]

Mr. Chair and honourable members, thank you for inviting Botler to testify before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, which is known as the mighty committee.

I thought you'd like that.

Botler is a Canadian public safety company focused on misconduct and legal violation detection using artificial intelligence. We believe the law is a public good, and our vision is to empower citizens with equal access to the legal system, in laypersons' terms. Our mission is to fight misconduct one incident at a time.

Botler's original technology was in the form of a chatbot. Today, Botler's technology is built upon GPT-4 and ChatGPT, which I believe you're familiar with.

Any individual who has faced or witnessed misconduct can visit our website at botler.com and get an impartial assessment from our AI for free. Botler educates the user on laws and legal concepts that are specifically applicable to their respective situation in order to empower them to take the next steps to enforce their rights.

In 2017, before AI was the mainstream staple that it is today, Botler was the first company in the world to apply AI to the detection of sexual misconduct, which was inspired by my own harrowing, traumatic experience with a workplace stalker. Our story was covered extensively by national and international media alike, including but not limited to The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC and Vice, to name a few, totalling over three billion press impressions.

Botler's work did not go unnoticed by the Government of Canada. In 2018, I was invited by then-minister Navdeep Bains to address the G7 on Botler's innovative work and discuss our approach toward AI and the law. I used the opportunity with the G7 ministers to present Botler's manifesto for a future in which we could provide our AI to every single person so that they would have equal access to the justice system.

In 2019, Botler won a competitive RFP with the legal aid directorate of the Department of Justice Canada. Through this initiative, we became the first regulated AI in the world to provide legal violation detections directly to citizens. In recognition of this momentous achievement, in 2020, I was recognized on the Forbes “30 Under 30” law and policy list. I was the only Canadian on the list.

As two international students who came here with big ambitions, Amir and I have dedicated ourselves to building Botler into a venture that can truly impact our fellow citizens' lives for the better and that can make Canada proud.

While Justice Canada's legal aid directorate were giving us a seat at the table and Botler was going from strength to strength, there was another faction within the Government of Canada that was also noticing us, but for completely different reasons. This small but powerful faction, spearheaded by the Canada Border Services Agency, had identified the perfect rationalization, incentive and opportunity in Botler. If you're familiar with it, you may recognize these three as the components of the triangle of fraud.

With the Auditor General's fall 2019 report on the culture of deeply entrenched workplace harassment at the CBSA, countless sexual harassment cases at the agency and the impending implementation of Bill C-65 to prevent harassment in federal workplaces, the CBSA had identified the perfect rationalization to kill three birds with one stone.

With over 300,000 federal public servants covered by Bill C-65 and Botler's existing technology as the only solution on the market that was available to provide full compliance with the bill, the CBSA had the perfect incentive to sell Botler's enterprise licences to the entire Government of Canada, using its own procurement vehicles, which would—quote—allow them to add infinite amount of funds to the price, to be executed through their usual suspects.

My personal profile as a female immigrant entrepreneur who refused to be a victim of sexual misconduct and transformed crippling trauma into something that attracted extensive goodwill from Justice Canada, the public and media alike provided the perfect opportunity for an optics operation that could funnel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. We later learned that this was executed through a set-aside for indigenous business contracts, which is yet another example of monetization and theft using the trauma of marginalized communities.

To seal the deal at the Privy Council, this faction used me and our sacred citizens' initiative with the Department of Justice as its false flag operation. However, it had one fatal flaw in its grand scheme. Botler was there on a mission, which was to prevent, detect and combat misconduct—and that's exactly what we did. We started submitting reports against this very faction.

In response, instead of protecting Canadian taxpayers and their hard-earned dollars, the government machine, including the CBSA, PSPC, TBS and other individuals, including legal services, mobilized to bury our reports and to attempt to obstruct justice—and all in Canada’s name.

In December 2022, during the same time that President O'Gorman said they were debating whether to send our reports to the RCMP, my emails were hacked and every record of an email that Kristian Firth had sent to me was mysteriously deleted.

We watched and waited patiently for someone to do the right thing and act on our reports. Instead, we were heartbroken as they lied. They lied to us. They lied to you at OGGO. They lied to Parliament, and they lied to Canadian taxpayers.

Sitting here today, I can assure you of one thing: Systemic government corruption existed before Botler. This systemic government corruption tried to manifest itself through Botler. Now, because of Botler, systemic government corruption will be annihilated.

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you.

Next is Mr. Morv, please, for five minutes.

[Amir Morv, Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler]

Mr. Chair and honourable committee members, I am a programmer and software architect with a focus on security. As part of my expertise, I study systems to identify vulnerabilities in order to mitigate their potential exploitation.

In November 2019, we were approached by the CBSA through their operative, Kristian Firth of GC Strategies. Since then, I have been closely studying and documenting numerous vulnerabilities that we have uncovered in Canada’s procurement regime. We have also witnessed these vulnerabilities being systematically exploited by the government officials in the highest levels of the public service. From our experience, the primary objective of this exploitation is to funnel tax dollars and public funds into private entities that lie outside of public purview. Professional services contracts, which are currently the subject of several committee studies and will cost taxpayers almost $20 billion this year, are the prime targets of this exploitation.

I refer to one such scheme as “ghost contracting,” which we have observed with Botler and ArriveCAN, which is the current study of the committee. For ArriveCAN, GC Strategies was a prime contractor that received significant commissions to then subcontract the work to third party companies, which were the ghost contractors. Based on documents tabled to this committee, GC Strategies claimed that the employees of these ghost contractors were the individuals named in the tabled task authorizations, TAs. These TAs were used to bill the government. As these ghost contractors are not subject to direct government purview, there is no way to validate that the named individuals actually performed the work or are even aware that they have been named in these task authorizations.

Also, this is assuming, basically, that these are real individuals with valid security clearances and not fake profiles created for these TAs. In Botler's case, there were three levels of contracting. GC Strategies operated as the ghost contractor, and Ritika and I identified personally as sub-subcontractors. Our identities were used without our knowledge or consent by Coradix and Dalian, entities that we have never heard of.

Another critical vulnerability that I would like to bring to your attention is the fact that Botler worked on the CBSA project with no contractual or legal agreement in place with the agency or with any of the subcontractors or contractors that were involved. Despite this, we were freely given access to non-public information by the CBSA, and Botler has full legal rights to all information that we have collected for this misconduct case. Now imagine the exposure that Canada would face if a bad actor is legally given access to sensitive information through similar means. Imagine the dangers that this would pose to our country.

If procurement rules have been respected, any resource named on a project should be aware of it. They should provide their written consent or sign a contractual agreement, and they should sign an NDA. However, the biggest vulnerability that I would like to draw your attention to is the fact that these contractors are openly engaged in various criminal activities. They openly commit frauds on the government by promising influence and requesting material benefit in exchange. One thing that we have consistently observed with both our Department of Justice work and our interactions with Public Safety is that an act of misconduct rarely happens in isolation. It is almost always symptomatic of a larger existence and tolerance of misconduct. Individuals engaged in such conduct are also prime targets of exploitation and extortion.

In our interactions with GC Strategies, Mr. Firth routinely boasted that he and his friends, senior government officials with contracting authorities, have “dirt” on each other, essentially guaranteeing silence through mutually assured destruction. While external contractors are engaged in misconduct and do the actual dirty work, I want to emphasize that their conduct would not be possible without backing from factions within the government. At least in our case, their conduct was fully directed by the faction within the government that we have encountered.

Unfortunately, once we began reporting our findings, the government machine mobilized to bury Botler’s reports and protect this corruption. The most shocking response we received came from Public Services and Procurement Canada with the involvement of its legal services. PSPC stated that Canada has determined that no rules were broken. This is while the same allegations were under RCMP investigation. When the government body that has been entrusted with overseeing and spending our tax dollars decides to selectively enforce its own rules, whether wilfully or through sheer negligence, this is dangerous.

Now, the bigger question is what else PSPC has turned a blind eye to in the expenditure of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you very much, Mr. Morv.

Ms. Kusie, we'll start with you for six minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Dutt and Mr. Morv, for being here today with us.

What you are sharing with us is very harrowing. It's incredibly disturbing.

I'd like Canadians to understand exactly what happened here. First, can you please explain to the Canadian public what ghost contracting is?

[Amir Morv]

Ghost contracting is basically a scheme in which a middleman who technically does no work is added to government contracts without any legal trace. Usually this middleman, or the ghost contractor, gets a significant amount of commission for their role of being in between. The money funnels through this entity, which is not legally traceable.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Based upon the testimony you've shared here today, would GC Strategies fit the definition you've just given to Canadians of what a ghost contractor is?

[Amir Morv]

That is correct.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

This company, GC Strategies, that received $11.2 million, in your opinion, is a ghost contractor.

[Amir Morv]

Yes.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

The other associated companies—Coradix and Dalian—received a combined total of $4.3 million of Canadian taxpayer money. Would you classify them as ghost contractors?

[Amir Morv]

Particularly with Botler, they were the prime contractors. I don't have any information on whether or not they were ghost contractors, because ghost contractors are untraceable.

Coradix and Dalian essentially hired a ghost contractor. Even though in our case they may not be the ghost contractor, they are part of the scheme, because they worked with the ghost contractor in particular. They could easily have worked directly with us. They chose to work with a ghost contractor to funnel the funds through this ghost contractor, which was GC Strategies.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

How did this ghost contracting affect you both personally?

[Amir Morv]

Our identities have been used without our knowledge or consent on a contract that is set aside for indigenous business. Unfortunately, our work experiences have been forged. The value of the contract we were promised was cut. Random deliverables were assigned to the task authorization that was assigned to this project.

It technically ruined our company, because this matter was not something that we could have delegated to someone to investigate. We had to start investigating this matter in January 2021. We had to operate at the lowest capacity for every other operation of the company to really focus on seeing what was going on to investigate the matter.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

You explained it briefly in your opening statement, but can you please explain again the scope of your project and what you were approached to do?

[Amir Morv]

Initially we were approached by CBSA through GC Strategies to begin a pilot project that was supposed to be implemented within CBSA. Right after the initiation of that pilot project, we were promised that enterprise licences of our software would be purchased for the entire Government of Canada. It was a licence per-user based purchase. That was the—

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

What is the standard rate per user?

[Amir Morv]

Our standard pricing per user per year is $60. GC Strategies suggested that it would be adding another $28 to that initial pricing. It was $78 per user per year for 300,000 employees, which was $23 million per year.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

This was the initial offer that GC Strategies made to you.

[Amir Morv]

Yes. GC Strategies mentioned that this would be purchased right after the pilot. CBSA was supposed to be the agency in which the pilot would be implemented.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Was that the final agreement you came to on the amount for the project you were supposed to undertake?

[Amir Morv]

That's correct.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

You completed the work and got paid.

[Amir Morv]

No, we haven't gotten paid. We completed the work, and we haven't gotten paid.