Mr. Chair, I wish a happy new year to you, to all committee members who are here today and to those who are subbing in for other committee members.
It's a pleasure to have the government operations committee functioning once again. Congratulations to everyone on the committee for having it named the best committee in the House of Commons. That's a big achievement for everyone.
Mr. Brennan, thank you very much for taking the opportunity to be here today.
ArriveCAN has plagued this nation. This is the touchstone of scandal in a government that has become synonymous with scandal. I could go on and on about other scandals that we've seen, for example, the green slush fund and the WE Charity scandal. As a result of these scandals, so many individuals, including current and former Liberal ministers, have been thrown under the bus. This week in The Globe and Mail, we saw that two public servants have also been thrown under the bus by the Liberal government, because Liberal ministers are not willing to take responsibility for their oversight of the ArriveCAN scandal. In this particular case, it has led to CBSA and RCMP investigations. These continue to plague not only former employees of the CBSA and the public safety department but also individuals throughout the public service who are asked about their willingness to speak up as to what they have seen, their communication with senior executives and their communication with ministers.
The unfortunate thing is that, in our uncovering of this over the fall, most of the feedback I received personally and on my social media was related to you and your relationship with the Deputy Prime Minister and her office. I think that this is only one of many individuals who are implicated in this scandal, not to mention these two individuals who were able to skim $11 million by working in their basement and doing very little. As well, they committed crimes of fraudulent résumé changing and perhaps even collusion.
We have you here today because we fundamentally want to get to the “who” at the highest level.
Mr. Brennan, you have begun some of this in your testimony, and I thank you for doing that. How many executives would you say you know personally in the Canadian public service?