Public Accounts Committee on May 2nd, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Yes.

I want to interrupt. Normally, I do it the other way, which means presenting the motion first and then speaking to it. Is this a new motion, or is it a motion that's already been...? You'll get to it.

Go ahead, but can you get to the motion right away, please?

Thank you.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

I appreciate that. Thank you, Chair. I know every chair does it a little differently, so I appreciate that.

I will move the motion. I believe it has been sent to the clerk as well for distribution in both of Canada's official languages.

I move:

That, in relation to the committee's ongoing work on government contracting and further to the information provided by the Treasury Board Secretariat on April 12, 2024, the committee order:

(a) the production of copies of the 140 conflict of interest declarations filed in the 2022-23 fiscal year and the 162 conflict of interest declarations filed in the 2023-24 fiscal year concerning public servants employed in the core public administration who were involved in contractual relationships with the Government of Canada;

(b) the production of copies of any conflict of interest declarations filed in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 fiscal years by persons employed by the federal government, including Crown corporations, but outside of the core public administration, who were involved in contractual relationships with the Government of Canada; and

(c) the production of records which detail all payments made in respect of the contractual relationships disclosed in the declarations referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b),

provided that

(d) the names and contact information of the public servants may be redacted;

(e) for greater certainty, no redactions shall be applied to the names of contracting entities or the value of the contractual relationship disclosed, including, where multiple relationships are disclosed, the value of each contractual relationship disclosed; and

(f) these documents, with only the redactions authorized by paragraph (d), shall be deposited with the Clerk of the Committee, in both official languages,

(i) in the case of the documents referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b), within 21 days of the adoption of this order, and

(ii) in the case of documents referred to in paragraph (c), within 35 days of the adoption of this order.

Chair, if I can reserve the right to speak to it, I will allow the opportunity for it to be distributed.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Yes, speak to it first, and then I'll get into the mechanisms. Be relatively brief, and I can come back to you again.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Chair, I'll be very brief.

While this motion is very technical, I think it speaks to the very simple fact that accountability is needed.

When it comes to Dalian, we have an egregious example of a public servant who was double-dipping. We are seeing this troubling trend come about since it appears, according to La Presse, that there could be around 30 federal employees who were paid by the government, while they were salaried employees, to test an artificial application designed by a private firm belonging to a senior federal executive in order to assess whether it was possible to use this technology to resolve problems with Phoenix.

We see—

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

Chair, I have a point of order.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Wait one second, Mr. Kurek.

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

Chair, I think we're seeing that this is the exact same motion as Mr. Nater's.

Are you going to speak to that?

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Can you please wrap up?

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Perfect.

I'm moving the motion, yes, that Mr. Nater brought forward.

We have these egregious examples of government employees who are moonlighting as contractors. It's seen that 38% could be in a conflict of interest. We want to know what those conflicts are.

Chair, I think it's a very simple request. While technical, it gets to the heart of what Canadians are simply demanding answers for.

I'll leave it at that.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

This motion was previously under consideration by the committee. Therefore, Mr. Kurek, I'd like a motion to resume debate on the motion from you.

I will ask the clerk if I have the words correct. This is a dilatory motion, which means we'll have a vote on it right away. We can take it up now—

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

I so move.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Did I get that right, clerk? Do you need to say anything, or shall I call the vote?

The vote before us right now is to resume debate on this motion. This is not to pass the motion; it is to pick up the debate on a motion we previously studied, the motion proposed by Mr. Nater on April 25. It's not debatable.

Clerk, could you call the vote, please, to resume debate on this motion?

(Motion agreed to: yeas 9; nays 1)

We will continue debate.

Mr. Kurek, I promised you the floor. It's over to you. Then I'll look for other speakers.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Thanks, Chair.

I think I made it clear in my preamble that answers are needed. Increasingly, in my regular committee assignment at the access to information, privacy and ethics committee, we are seeing a troubling trend of there seeming to be no end to public dollars being abused.

Chair, I would suggest that the way this motion is written is very specific. We simply need to ensure that if there was what could be double-dipping.... If employees who are working in a department are moonlighting as contractors and getting contracts from that department, I would certainly hope no one around this table would suggest it's a good idea or a responsible use of public dollars, nor would Canadians. I would suggest to the Canadians watching, if that is in fact the case, that there is a serious challenge with the way public dollars are being administered in terms of employees and the rules and regulations around what they are allowed to do when it comes to contracts and procurement.

Chair, I will leave it at that. I'm hopeful we can have support. The specifics of this motion are very direct. We, of course, want to respect the privacy of those individuals. However, if a federal employee has a company engaged in a contract with the federal government, as it specifically says in this motion, it certainly needs to be public, as do, of course, the dollars associated with that.

Chair, I hope common sense will prevail. I hope we can produce these documents so that my very capable colleagues who sit as regular members of this committee are able to provide the transparency that Canadians demand and certainly deserve, the transparency that Conservatives are diligently working so hard each and every day to provide.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kurek.

Mrs. Shanahan, you have the floor.

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

Chair, I would like to clarify first that we're resuming debate on the motion of Mr. Nater. It is the exact same one. We had a copy of that, so we can disregard whatever came afterwards.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

It was identical. I was following as he read.

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

I was following along for a while trying to pick that up.

As I often argue here, when it comes to asking for the production of copies of numerous documents, we don't know exactly what that looks like. Is it a summary sheet like this? Is it a pile like that? We don't know how they're filed or how they're kept.

In this committee, it is appreciated when we can talk about motions beforehand. We've done that in the past and we can come to ground on what should be a common purpose here, which is transparency and looking to better serve the Canadian public.

These documents would have to be translated. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know if Mr. Kurek knows what that looks like. We don't have Mr. Nater here, so I don't know if he was able to make some determination on that as well. We didn't look at it on our side since we didn't think we were dealing with the number of documents that we have to deal with.

Just looking at colleagues, I'm looking for a change in the number of days. It would be to change, in paragraph (f)(i), “21 days”, to “60 days”. In paragraph (f)(ii), it's to change the “35 days” to “60 days”.

I think that gives the public service a little bit more time. Given our experience with days being moved around, I can suggest some more formal wording.

I move the amendment that we remove (i) and (ii) and replace—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Is this in (f)(i) and (f)(ii)?

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

It's just the days. It would be “within 60 days of the adoption of this order”. It's to strike “21” and replace it with “60”.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

It's an amendment to the motion to replace “21” with “60”. We're now debating that.

We'll go to Mr. McCauley. Mr. Desjarlais, I'll come to you next.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am completely opposed to this amendment.

We are looking for 140 conflict of interest declarations that are already on file. We know the names. We know where the files are. Most of them are probably already in English or French, but if they're not, there are only 140. There were 162 filed for 2023-24. That's hardly a large number. We have a very capable public service, which I'm sure can get these to us in a day, which is much less than the time period the Liberals are offering, which, funnily enough, takes us into summer, when we actually can't get to them.

There's been a great cloud of distrust placed over large segments of the public service because of this ongoing issue that started with ArriveCAN and that has spread into this double-dipping. This is why we need to get to this.

One of the gentleman, the chap from Dalian, came to the operations committee. He had made the front page of The Globe and Mail, and yet not a single person in this government sat there and thought, “Holy cow—Mr. Yeo, you have the same name and you look just like this guy in The Globe and Mail who is under investigation. We've been working side by side for 20 years. It must not be you.” We've had ministers who somehow have been unaware that this has been going on, at department after department.

I'm hoping this is not a systemic issue, but I think we need to put it behind us quickly and get answers quickly so we can move on. I think 21 days and 35 days to get effectively 302 different documents is nothing, considering the size of our public service, considering the competency of our public service. I think we owe it to them to get this cleared so we can put this scandal—for lack of better words—behind us.

I appreciate what Mrs. Shanahan is doing, as she always does, which is trying to delay and pushing back. If there were 100,000 documents or 10,000 documents, I could see that, but 140 conflict of interest declarations that are already filled out and filed are not that difficult to find.

The fact that the government was able to count 140 means they know exactly where they are and that they have easy access. I'm sure we could get them by next Monday if we really wanted them.

I'm going to suggest that we stick with the original 21 days and 35 days, which is extremely reasonable.

Thank you, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

Mr. McCauley, you don't have to think those thoughts about Mrs. Shanahan. I just assumed she wanted to sit in the summer.

Mr. Desjarlais, you have the floor.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

I often strive, particularly in this case, to get unanimous consent for the work we do. I think that's your goal too, Mr. Chair.

We often, in the discussion of the production of documents, come to this discussion of how many documents and when. I support this motion in its original language. I also support the proposed amendments by Mrs. Shanahan, if that means they'll be voting in favour of the motion.

I think it is reasonable, especially for the committee that's investigating something as serious as this, to attempt to find consensus with respect to what often plagues our entire country. Both governments, Conservatives and Liberals, have had massive scandals for a very long time on very similar issues. New Democrats have been consistent in our approach in wanting to fix this in an earnest way. If we have support from the government, the governing members, to investigate this conduct, and if there's earnest will by the Conservatives not to make cheap political points out of this, I think we could actually get to a position where these recommendations could be valid. They could come to a point where we might agree on recommendations to finally end this hundred years of insiders benefiting.

Those are just my thoughts , Chair, because it's not as though these scandals didn't exist before. We've seen many scandals in the previous governments under the Conservatives, and we have seen many scandals under this current government.

The concern is that this is obviously ongoing. I don't want to see this happen to our public purse anymore. I don't want to see the public service continually rammed to the ground while insiders and lobbyists continuously get access.

If there's actually earnest support to get the unanimous consent of all parties here today to actually properly investigate this issue and it comes to a point where there are recommendations to end this decades-long fiasco....

We heard about Dalian, a donor to the Conservative Party. This goes on for both sides.

If we're really serious about this work—and I really do mean that in a genuine offer—we could come to a point of being unanimous on this investigation and actually end it.

Those are my thoughts.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

Mr. Kurek, you have the floor again.