Evidence of meeting #81 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 cbsa.
A video is available from Parliament.
October 26th, 2023 / 4:55 p.m.
Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler
I'm sorry.
There's a list of individuals within the CBSA who are engaged with the Botler project in one way or another. Mr. MacDonald specifically gave us some names. For example, he mentioned that Pierre Lessard has the values and ethics piece of this task authorization. He's the individual who's now in charge of the investigation of this file within the CBSA.
There's a long list of individuals who were involved in this pilot.
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
Was there ever any mention of a minister, or communication with a minister about a ministerial decision for this pilot project?
Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler
For this pilot project specifically, no, there was not, but for the enterprise licences that were the bigger licences for the Government of Canada, yes, there was.
Chief Executive Officer, Botler
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Were you consistently communicating with Mr. Firth? Was he your only non-governmental contact relative to this contract?
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
You mentioned that Mr. Firth brought in Mr. MacDonald, as well as Mr. Brouillard. Was there any other party who was involved in these middle-person conversations?
Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler
Not for the pilot, no. It was just Mr. Firth.
However, for the bigger enterprise software, yes, there was an individual by the name of Vaughn Brennan, who Mr. Firth stated rubbed shoulders with every ADM in town. He was brought in as a consultant.
Conservative
Conservative
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
Thank you so much for being here today.
I think we're all trying to wrap our minds around what's occurred here and how to move forward.
I'm looking at one of the reports of misconduct that were submitted by Botler AI. An allegation was made that Kristian Firth of GC Strategies approached you on behalf of Cameron MacDonald, the then-director general of the CBSA, about securing this contract. There is a statement that says that Mr. Firth organized meetings between Botler and Mr. MacDonald, who advised them on how to pitch their software to John Ossowski, then-president of the CBSA.
Can you talk about what the nature of those conversations was? Was it on how to pitch your software? What were the tools of the trade or the advice that was offered to you?
Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler
We had a few different interactions with Mr. MacDonald, who was very hands-on, about how the software should be pitched and how we should technically position the software in a way so that it would be implemented by the former president, Mr. Ossowski.
We had a meeting at the CBSA's offices. The meeting began and we pitched the software the same way we pitch it to everybody. Mr. MacDonald stopped us and told us that this is the direction we should go in, and basically gave us some hints on what value the software should bring to the government, why the president should be interested in the software and why it should be implemented.
Liberal
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
You also stated in some of the documents you provided that you'd never heard of Dalian before. Is that correct?
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
You said that you had only given information to Coradix Technology Consulting under the belief that it was handling your security clearance.
What gave you that belief?
Chief Technology and Security Officer, Botler
We received an email from Kristian Firth, which was forwarded. It was an email with directions on how to conduct a security clearance. At the bottom of that email there was a very brief, one-line sentence saying that, for any information, just refer to [email protected]. That was the first time that we saw the name of Coradix.
We followed that instruction. There was a link on that email. We followed the link and immediately we received an email from the hiring manager, who was Antonio Utano.
At that point we thought that security was probably being conducted by Coradix. The reason we were misled into believing this was that we were never provided any information on the security clearance process. Even at the end when we signed the security briefing forms.... There is a clause on those forms that the organization that holds the security clearances should brief us on what the security clearances mean. I believe they signed that clause, but we were never briefed. We were never provided any information on how the system works or how the security screening works in general.
We weren't even provided with a reference letter or a requesting letter for the security clearances. We were provided verbal instructions to go and conduct our security clearances at a fingerprinting office.
We approached this office. We went to this office and the person who was conducting the security clearance was surprised and told us they had never seen anything like that, where someone comes with a verbal contract for security clearances. At the beginning, they told us that they couldn't really process the request because we didn't have an official document. We showed them the email we had received from Antonio Utano, the hiring manager. We ended up doing the security screening and it went through.
All that time we were thinking that Coradix was an entity that was conducting the background check on us, which is common. We also use the same entities for our own employees.
Liberal
Jenica Atwin Liberal Fredericton, NB
It's clear to me where Dalian comes in because they were what appears to be the flow-through as an Indigenous-led organization. It is deeply disturbing to me that it was used in such a manner.
Where does Coradix come in? Are they often working together? Were they pitched to you as a dual kind of company?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
I'm afraid that is our five minutes. Perhaps you can get back to us in writing or in the next round.
Ms. Vignola, go ahead for two and a half minutes, please.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It still amazes me to see that, for dealing with the aesthetic aspect of the application, 8,190 days of work were billed. I can't get over it; it's blowing me away.
At one time, in the time of handwritten HTML, I created a website from A to Z, and it must have taken me about 80 hours. That was in 1999, so it wasn't very complicated. Of those 80 hours, I billed for 40, but that's another matter.
Whatever the case may be, the situation amazes me.
After you started the disclosure process, did you notice that strange things were happening? After you submitted your document to Erin O'Gorman, for example, did anything really strange happen to you, or did everything continue normally?
Chief Executive Officer, Botler
As I mentioned, in December 2022, after we submitted the misconduct report to the CBSA, my emails were hacked and any records of emails that were sent from Kristian Firth directly to me were mysteriously deleted from my inbox.
Since then we have an email tracking solution called Mailtrack. Through Mailtrack, we are able to see which emails are being accessed. Only emails that are related to this misconduct and this wider misconduct that we have uncovered are being surreptitiously and suspiciously accessed at different times, so it is clear that my and Amir's communications are under surveillance.