Thank you, Mr. Chair.
For the committee's sake and for those who are listening in, I want to read the motion back into the record:
That given recent media reports that the Public Health Agency of Canada lost over $300 million on an unfulfilled contract, the committee undertake a study of the Public Health Agency of Canada losing over $300 million in taxpayers' money for an unfulfilled contract, the committee hold 6 hours of meetings on this matter and that each current meeting of the Health Committee is expanded by one hour, to address this matter and that the committee hear from the Minister of Health, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, President of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the President of the Treasury Board, and officials from the health ministry, and other witnesses deemed relevant by the committee, and that hearings begin at the next available meeting, and that the committee produce a report on its findings and report it to the House.
Mr. Chair, this is shocking. Again, now we're finding out.... It's not new news. It goes along the lines of “same old same old”.
I'll go down the list of scandals and wasteful spending: $54 million on the ArriveCAN app; $116 million on McKinsey consultants—that was $116 million towards our opioid epidemic, Mr. Chair; $26.8 million in bonuses to CMHC employees; a $30,000 total for Prime Minister Trudeau's London hotel room, booked September 15 to 20 at $6,000 per night; $4.6 billion in COVID program abuse; $210 million in payments to the Beijing-controlled Asian infrastructure bank; $30.9 billion in Trans Mountain pipeline cost overruns; $8.6 million in renovations to the Harrington Lake cottage; $50 million for Mastercard; over $400 million to change our passport to some woke crap; and $12 million for Loblaws. That's $12 million for freezers.
Mr. Chair, I will offer—I've said this a number of times—that this was around the 2017 wildfires, in which thousands of residents in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George were devastated and lost everything: fridges, stoves and all household belongings. Did they get money for the replacement of their equipment? No. However, Justin Trudeau gave $12 million to his friends at Loblaws. Now he is claiming he called them to Ottawa and laid down the law. We saw how that went. It was a “Stop, or I'll say stop again” type of thing.
Mr. Chair, this is an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars. If you buy a service from a contractor but don't get the service you need, you should have the option to get your money back.
On October 23, 2020, the Prime Minister made an announcement:
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced an investment of up to $173 million through the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) in Quebec City-based Medicago to support Canada's response to COVID-19—
That's $173 million. Then it says:
The project, valued at a total of $428 million, will advance Medicago's virus-like particle vaccine, developed on the company's unique plant-based production platform, through clinical trials. It will also establish a large-scale vaccine and antibody production facility to increase Canada's domestic biomanufacturing capacity.
Mr. Chair, who are Medicago, and who are they to the Liberal Party? I can tell you this: They rank enough to get into the 2021 Liberal Party's platform, “Forward. For Everyone.” I turn readers' attention to page 8. Here it is, right here, if everyone can see it. It's on page 8 and it says: “We have completed the new Biologics Manufacturing Centre at the NRC, secured an agreement with Moderna to build a state-of-art manufacturing facility in Canada, and made major domestic capacity investments with AbCellera [and] Medicago”.
They're so big that they warranted getting a shout-out and being promoted in the Liberal Party's 2021 campaign platform and, Mr. Chair, that's just a cursory search. I'm sure that when we do more digging we're going to find connections either to the Trudeau Foundation or to Prime Minister Trudeau himself.
This is shocking. You know, I fight day and night for investments in mental health. In 2021, they also campaigned on a platform to make critical investments—