Public Accounts Committee on March 7th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

It's back to you, Ms. Khalid.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you. I appreciate that, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Barrett, there is no fish that has been caught here. The many thousands and thousands of hours that you guys have spent in trying to find something here that doesn't pass your sniff test, and the fact that you keep on calling so many committee meetings on this, tell me that you haven't really found anything.

I think what we have found and what all parliamentarians agree on is that something happened with the ArriveCAN app, and we need to make sure that bureaucrats are held responsible. We want to make sure that the money that was paid out to these middle-management folks is brought back to our government and that Canadians have accountability for how their tax dollars are spent.

What we are not finding, regardless of all of your countless efforts, is that this was a ministerial sign-off, that the Prime Minister, for some reason, signed off on this. That is not what happened here.

We've spent 6,000 hours on this so far. Let's talk about not finding anything for 6,000 hours. What are one or two more hours with the President of the Treasury Board going to do? She's going to come in and add to the 6,000-hour tally and millions of taxpayer dollars so that the Conservatives can go on sniffing and trying to find something, and they haven't found anything.

What I would appreciate is if we had public officials coming in to talk about what the next steps are, how we can get our taxpayer dollars back and how we can fix the process here. Are we able to not make everything political? I would really appreciate it if we're not just trying to find those cheap political wins in every single thing, as the Conservatives are doing. Let's actually do something productive. That's what the purpose of the public accounts committee is, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate all of your efforts in making sure that we are doing our very best to hear from all of the witnesses.

The reality is that we still don't have a game plan. We've had so many meetings and we still don't have a game plan as to what our next steps are within this committee. We can call a million and one witnesses, but until and unless we as a committee decide how we are going to move forward, what recommendations we are going to provide to our government, and what we need to do to make sure that something like this does not happen again, why are we going on a wild goose chase?

Again, I reiterate that I have no problem with any minister appearing before the committee, but I think that it is ineffective. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars. It is a waste of all of the amazing people who are in the room right now, making sure that this meeting happens. It's unfortunate. I would hope that my colleagues agree with me.

I know that my Conservative colleagues are still going to go down this path of a witch hunt to try to find something they can take and run with. At this point, rather than having the minister come in, I think perhaps the best thing that we can do is bring back the officials of the TBS to talk about how we are going to move forward on this and about how we are going to hold people to account and make sure that this does not happen again in the future.

Therefore, I would move an amendment to say that we change “President of the Treasury Board” so that it says, “invite back officials from TBS”.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Wait just one second.

Ms. Khalid, I'm going to rule that the amendment is out of order because it changes the fundamental nature of the motion. You're welcome to bring that back forward—

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I'm so sorry, Mr. Chair. I would love some clarification on why you think that it's out of order.

I mean, as I said in my remarks, we still don't have a work plan. We have no idea where we're going with this. We keep having meeting after meeting. It's not just in the public accounts committee; it's in so many other committees across Parliament. I don't know how you would rule this out of order if we don't even know what the purpose of all of this is at the end of the day.

Are we trying to just find something to link to ministers to give political scoring points to our Conservative colleagues, or are we trying to get to the bottom of this? If we are trying to get to the bottom of this to find next steps and provide solid recommendations, then how is this out of order?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

It fundamentally changes the motion. You're welcome to bring it forward—

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

So does that mean—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Ms. Khalid, I allowed you to speak. Please return the courtesy.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I apologize, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

You're welcome to bring it back if you want officials from any department either to appear or to come back. This is about calling a minister of the Crown to appear before this committee, so I'm ruling your amendment out of order.

You still have the floor, and I have two other speakers.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair. Before we continue, I would like to challenge the chair's decision.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

All right. I will turn things over to the clerk to call the vote.

Just to refresh everyone, it's on the challenge that's being made.

For the Bloc Québécois, is Mr. Lemire still online to vote?

It looks like it. Thank you.

Just to move things along, Ms. Khalid, could you perhaps repeat in the meantime what your amendment is?

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. My amendment is to change the wording “the President of the Treasury Board” to “invites back officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat”.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

The clerk will now call the roll.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Hilary Smyth]

Shall the chair's decision be sustained?

(Ruling of the chair sustained: yeas 5; nays 5)

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

My vote, obviously, is to sustain my ruling.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Hilary Smyth]

Ms. Khalid, you have the floor.

The motion stands as presented by Mr. Genuis, with the exception that we've corrected it to read “ArriveCAN”.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.

Again I am a little disappointed that we don't have a clear pathway forward. What are we doing here? We're spending so many taxpayer dollars on finding resources, and what's the objective here?

To me, in this committee, the objective is to find clear-cut recommendations in the Auditor General's report on ArriveCAN, to take what she wrote into consideration and to find a way, with all of the witnesses we have had, to put together some solid recommendations to say this is what needs to happen going forward to make sure that things like this do not happen again; this is what needs to happen to make sure we are continuing to build Canadians' trust in our democratic institutions; this is what needs to happen to make sure we are able to bring back the money that was spent on this; and this is what needs to happen to make sure we find fair value for the money that is spent going forward.

We don't have any of that, and we keep on calling witnesses. I think it was December 12 when all of us on this committee—the permanent members of this committee, none of whom are here today—spent over an hour working together to find out how we could find and build a consensus and talk about accountability, talk about how we were going to move forward together specifically on this issue. The fact that since then and until now we haven't been able to find a pathway forward and to find the next steps is disappointing to me, and for us to keep on calling witnesses who have literally nothing to add to what has already been said is disappointing to me as well.

We have heard again and again from every single department on this that there was no ministerial sign-off on this, that ministers were not involved. This was a middle-management issue. There are RCMP investigations happening. What is the role of our committee, then, if all we're doing is trying to find linkages between political work and what has egregiously happened here? We can't keep doing that, Chair.

I would ask that you perhaps reconsider that the best way forward for us here is not to try to find that red herring or whatever it is that Conservatives are looking for but rather to bring us back to reasonable decision-making with respect to what the next steps are. How are we going to fix our process? That is what our committee is and should be doing, rather than going on these fishing expeditions. I would again submit to you, Chair, that I think the best thing we could do would be to bring in TBS officials to talk about those next steps, rather than a minister, who really, as we've heard time and again, had nothing at all to do with this.

I'll stop there, Chair. Hopefully, we will come back to it at a later time.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Shanahan, you have the floor.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I must echo the words of my colleague. We've had six, seven, eight, nine meetings on this issue, and we have consistently heard from the Auditor General's team, as well as the officials from numerous departments, that in the exercise of procurement, it is not only advisable not to have political interference; indeed, it is part of the standards of professional practice and in keeping with this separation of the machinery of government, which must continue regardless of who the government in power is, and the political side, which, rightly so, is presenting the kind of vision and policy and way forward and new legislation and so on that needs to be put forward to ensure that Canadians have a better quality of life and can enjoy the standards that Canada enjoys on so many levels.

At a time of one of the greatest crises we've had in the last hundred years, a global pandemic, this professional public service was able to procure the kind of protective equipment and the kind of administrative and management processes that were needed to protect Canadians until vaccines were developed, which, again, were obtained by this professional team. I will wager that none of us here around the table would have been able to do the same work.

Chair, would you agree with me? Would you have liked to be in that seat, trying to get PPE, trying to get people to develop an application and trying to develop vaccines?

No. We are politicians. We have a role. We represent our constituencies, but we are not here to run the machinery of government. That, rightly, is separate from the political arm, but to hear my Conservative colleagues speak, the political arm should be dipping its fingers into every pie, and I think we know what that would mean. We've all travelled enough and have seen other regimes in other countries to know what that means. That means favouritism, corruption and, certainly, at its most benign, an inefficient and ineffectual government.

It is really only in this issue, which we are all gripped with...the fact that there was inappropriate contracting and there were bad actors taking advantage. That is what is horrific in this case: To think that for all of the public servants who were working above and beyond the call of duty during a very difficult time, there were some bad actors who were taking advantage of that crisis to line their own pockets.

We are gripped with that, and that is the reason I and I think everyone here around the table has confidence that the investigations that are being conducted right now—not just internally and not just by the Auditor General, but also by the RCMP—will get to the truth of the matter, and that those who are responsible will be held to account. That is how we can ensure that our public service can continue to operate with integrity. It's not by picking and choosing who we want to blame and who we want to throw in jail or whatever it is, and the showboating that some politicians want to do.

When we come back to this motion, my preference would definitely be to invite back ministry officials, deputy ministers and so on, which is why, again, Chair, we had to pass a motion here earlier in the week. I'm glad for the support we had from the NDP to invite deputy ministers to these hearings, because we were not consulted at all about the number of meetings. We had an original motion that talked about two meetings, but we were not consulted about holding further meetings, about who those witnesses would be and how they were chosen, or about the length of time and when those meetings would occur.

It really has been extremely frustrating for the members here who really want to get to the bottom of what transpired and be able to produce a report out of this study that will actually be useful in enabling officials going forward—and parliamentarians, for that matter—to continue to have confidence that the oversight function will be overhauled and upheld. We heard testimony to that effect, but as we have done in the past, we will ask for a follow-up.

We have asked for action plans. I and the NDP member at the time, in the 42nd Parliament, asked for action plans to be submitted to public accounts, so that we had assurances that our recommendations were indeed being followed up on—ours and the Auditor General's. I'm not sure....

You know, I appreciate that our regular member from the NDP, Mr. Desjarlais, could not be with us during this time. I want to extend my sympathies to him and his family. I understand he's going through a difficult time right now.

We've had different members from the NDP here, and I'm not sure they realized yesterday, in passing the other last-minute motion by Mr. Genuis yesterday, that they were actually putting a target on the back of any and all public servants who may or may not be legitimately carrying out other contracts for the federal government.

I'm not an expert in this field, but whenever we try to make a “one rule fits all”, there are always a number of very viable and understandable exceptions to that. However, you know, Mr. Genuis was going for that hit and trying to actually, in having that reported to the House, use up time in the House of Commons with these. I believe over 6,000 hours and over 200 reports are on notice right now that can be debated on a concurrent modus.

Basically, Chair, when a report has been produced out of a committee, everybody has agreed and the report has been tabled, why all of a sudden do we want to have three hours of extended debate, essentially a filibuster, on the report, in the House of Commons? It's to waste time in the House of Commons. We know that we have important legislation. In fact, there's the pharmacare legislation. I'm so pleased that we were able to work with the NDP to put forward this pharmacare legislation. As a member in Quebec, I'm well aware of how important and life-changing having access to prescription drugs is. Now we'll be able to extend that across the country—but will we? We have 6,000 hours projected of “waste the House of Commons' time” concurrence motions on notice by the Conservative government.

I would ask for all members here to consider this: If we really want to have the minister here, why don't we just invite her? We have had ministers here before. We can just invite her. That's all right. That's something that this committee has done. We've always been respectful of the fact that ministers have many time constraints. I think it behooves us to have a motion from this committee that shows that respect.

Again, if we were discussing this as we usually do in committee—it could be in camera, it could be in public, but it would be together as a committee, during committee business—we could have come to a reasonable invitation to the minister, but no, here we are. We're over time. People have other things to do, but Mr. Genuis decided this was the ideal time to pull this stunt.

I move to amend the motion by deleting the words “and that this meeting occur within three weeks of this motion being adopted”.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is certainly in order.

We will now debate the amendment to the motion. It would remove the three weeks.

Ms. Idlout, would you like to speak to this, or would you like to just hold on until we come back to the main motion? The floor is yours, if you'd like it.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

No, I'd like to speak later.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Okay. Thank you.

Ms. Yip, would you like to speak to this amendment or would you like to have me hold your name and come back to you once this amendment is addressed?

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I can speak to this. Can we put this to a vote?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Once we're done speaking to it, we can. Are you done?

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Yes. Let's just put it to a vote.