Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 4th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

That is not a point of order.

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

I'm working in my constituency office during the entire time. It is absolutely unfair—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Ms. Khalid, this is debate.

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

—for the Conservatives to suggest I am going to be away on holiday.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you, Ms. Khalid. You are welcome to make these points. I can see where this is going.

I'm going to excuse the witnesses.

You are excused. Thank you very much. We might see you again very soon.

Mr. Nater, it's back to you.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Well, allow me to rephrase it.

Obviously, the Liberals want to take a holiday from accountability.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I just want to make sure this includes our friends who joined us virtually from EDC.

You are all excused. I understand you're probably in time zones far away. I don't know whether it's “good night” or “good morning”, but have a good day. Thank you. We appreciate your coming.

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I will rephrase my comment. I didn't want to imply that parliamentarians aren't working in their ridings. Obviously, however, the Liberals want to take a holiday from accountability for the next six weeks.

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

I take exception to that again, Chair. Let's just not.... Let's debate the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Ms. Khalid, these are not points of order. I appreciate the banter back and forth. I'm happy, of course, to put you down on the list again, but I would ask you to not interrupt speakers.

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Obviously, ducking from accountability seems to be the rule of the day with this motion. Maybe it's a bit too close to home for these Liberals after this meeting, but I digress.

First of all, saying that we shouldn't have any meetings during this time period really handcuffs our committee and prevents us from doing our job. It's preventing us from looking at, for example, CEBA, the first point of the motion, until after January 27, 2025, while also ending and killing other motions. Despite the fact that we actually had a subcommittee meeting to discuss this, here we are with this Liberal guillotine motion, as it's called. It's interesting that when there are hard-hitting studies, the Liberals are eager to dispose of them, yet they come here and try to say all the great things they're doing out of the darkness of this report.

Let's talk about this motion at hand and why it is important that we look at the CEBA motion and not kill it until seven or eight weeks from now. What we heard today, in the limited testimony from our virtual participants from EDC, is, quite frankly, unacceptable. It fails to address the seriousness of this report. It fails to actually provide forthright and clear answers to what I would say are very simple questions. The fact that Mr. McCauley had to ask yes-or-no questions multiple times is, quite frankly, unacceptable.

There's the fact that they accepted responsibility for a program, knowing full well that they didn't have the capacity to do it. There's the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars went to Accenture, despite the fact that Accenture didn't actually deliver the loans. It was the financial institutions that were delivering the loans. You have a breakdown in documentation. I mean, Mr. McCauley and I quipped a bit about GC Strategies being involved in terms of what happened here.

It's interesting; if you read the April 2020 testimony from the minister at the time, Minister Mary Ng, she said, “In fact, the decision-maker on the loan will be that financial institution, the bank or the credit union, to the customers. I would encourage businesses to go to their financial institution to see if they are able to get that support.” However, we have this example where EDC, which was not a loan provider.... I think they said in total they did somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 loans internationally, but now there was an expectation to do hundreds of thousands of loans.

It was doomed to be a challenge from the start. What we've seen now with the Auditor General's report is that, unfortunately, that has come to fruition. The fact that Accenture was delivered on a sole-source contract, something that our colleague Madame Sinclair-Desgagné highlighted several months ago, is, frankly, unacceptable. It does not comply with the rules.

You know, I hear some people trying to justify it, that we were in a pandemic and things had to happen fast. The Auditor General dispelled that and said very clearly today that perhaps there could have been a case made for the initial contract, but there were off-ramps all the way around where quick procurement requests for proposals could have been undertaken that would not have been sole-source contracts. That's the real challenge.

We had questions. Mr. Morantz helped me with one of my questions. He was quite interested in the forgivable portion of those loans. For some of these loans that were supposed to have a forgivable portion, in some cases it was $10,000 and in some cases it was $20,000, depending on which intake it was. Where's that money now? If it wasn't eligible for the loan itself, surely the non-repayable portion would be ineligible as well, yet here we are, not getting those answers.

The big concern I had from today was that I believe 17 cases were found to have been potentially fraudulent. They were referred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Those totalled in the amount of $1 million. A million dollars went to potentially fraudulent activities. That's significant.

I know there are Canadians out there right now who are really suffering, really trying to pinch their pennies together to make sure that they have something on the dinner table at Christmas this year and have something underneath the tree for their young kids. We see sky-high food bank use, yet we have an example here of $1 million of financing just going out to potentially fraudulent activities.

That's just the fraudulent side of things for those who are ineligible, with over $3.5 billion. No normal Canadian, no average Canadian, will ever see $3.5 billion in their bank account, yet that's the amount that has been taken out the door by ineligible payments. I think it's highly unacceptable.

There is the situation with Finance Canada and the Minister of Finance, we assume, because the Minister of Finance is accountable for everything within the department, through the deputy minister, who is currently Mr. Forbes. He is the person under the Financial Administration Act who is responsible. That's just to respond to the earlier comment from the previous motion, on which debate has now been adjourned. It is the current accounting officer, the deputy minister, who is subject to accountability to this very committee.

The fact that they were told to deliver this program despite the fact that they did not have the capability or the capacity to do so, was, frankly, unacceptable. If you look on the Export Development Canada website, it says, “As international risk experts, we help Canadian companies to navigate, manage and take on risk to support their growth beyond Canada's borders.”

Their work is not in loans. They are not a lending agency to domestic Canadian businesses. To go from talking about, potentially, 300 loans to, I believe, talking about, potentially, 900,000.... It simply boggles the mind that this was something that Finance Canada allowed, even forced upon them, and that EDC actually accepted it. They actually had to have a change in their mandate to even be allowed to do this work to begin with.

The fact that this was actually setting off alarm bells on day one is just, frankly, astonishing. EDC as a corporation has really failed the litmus test of basic accountability standards. The Auditor General made it very clear, and I'm going to quote a very brief sentence. She wrote this on page 19: “Basic cost controls were missing in EDC's management of CEBA contracts”.

They didn't know what they were doing. They didn't have even the most basic cost controls on these contracts, but they allowed it just to go without being accountable. It's truly astonishing. Again, hundreds of millions went to Accenture, which then awarded another contract to its own subsidiary.

It just gets worse. You would have thought that the ArriveCAN study was bad, but this one is even worse. Again, we have a government that tries to explain it away. I heard one Liberal MP say that it's not so bad because 91% of businesses were eligible. Yes, but 9%, representing $3.5 billion, were not. That's the thing the Liberals don't understand. That is a boatload of money that is hard to come by in the current economic climate.

I found a lot of things disappointing about the witness testimonies coming to us by Zoom, despite the fact that their head office is 450 metres from this very building, but I digress on that point. I really was disappointed that they failed to take accountability. There were no admissions that they failed. There were no admissions that they had made mistakes or that they had failed in their basic fundamental principles to protect taxpayers' dollars. They really didn't do that. I shouldn't just focus on EDC, because it's not the only one that failed. Finance is equally, if not more, culpable in this case.

The Auditor General pointed out pretty clearly in 8.42 of the report that, “there were very different interpretations amongst the departments regarding their responsibilities and accountabilities”. She went on to say, “no department took the lead to implement basic program elements.” It seems like each of the departments experienced this program differently. No one is accountable. No one was taking the lead. No one is taking accountability for how this program unfolded.

When we look at how this could have been better managed, we really have to question why this was even allowed. This was simply unacceptable.

Chair, I foreshadowed that I would make a small amendment to this. I move, in the first point, where it says, “Any further meetings on Report 8, Canada Emergency Business Account, take place after January 27, 2025”, that “January 27, 2025” be replaced with “December 5, 2024”. I think that's a common sense amendment. Hopefully, it will be acceptable.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I'm sorry. Give me just one second. Hold on. I thought you were going to take longer than that. I'm going to pull up the motion. I want to make sure I understand it.

This is in point 1. Oh, I see. After December....

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Instead of January 27, 2025, it would be December 5, 2024.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Okay. All right.

We have an amendment on the floor to point 1.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Can you clarify the amendment please?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Instead of, “Any further meetings on Report 8, Canada Emergency Business Account, take place after January 27, 2025”, the amendment would replace the date with “December 5, 2024”.

You can speak to that if you like.

I have Madame Sinclair-Desgagné, who wishes to speak to the amendment.

Once again, Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné, the date would be changed from January 27, 2025 to December 5, 2024.

Just for everyone, I'm starting a new list for the amendment. I have the original list for....

Okay. Very good.

Go ahead, Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

My points will be quite clear and succinct, I hope.

I think several aspects of the motion are consistent with what the subcommittee decided, that is, to conclude the study on the ArriveCan app and the study on SDTC, and to proceed with the study on the CEBA.

First, I did not have the chance to speak to the previous motion regarding the CEBA, but since that is the first item, we need to conduct a real study on the CEBA. The Auditor General's report is in fact quite scathing when it comes to EDC's management and the hundred of millions of dollars that flowed to Accenture, once again, for what specific deliverables we do not know.

I think it is our duty as parliamentarians to do the work as quickly as possible, but we also have to remember our families. We also have to consider requests from our constituents during the parliamentary break. Since the CEBA study isn't urgent, I would be agreeable to keeping the first item as it is written. So I am opposed to Mr. Nater's proposed amendment.

That being said, as parliamentarians we also have to exercise good judgment in emergencies. So I disagree with item 9 in Ms. Khalid's motion, which would prevent us from holding emergency meetings.

As to the first item, I agree that there will be no meetings on Report 8 before January 27, 2025, but I think the committee has a duty to meet in the event of an emergency.

I'm not sure if it's possible, but I would also like to propose a subamendment.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

We are listening.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

I don't know if it's possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Neither do we.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Regarding the first item in Ms. Khalid's motion, I would like to revert to January 27, 2025. Is it possible to do that?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

No, you opposed Mr. Nater's amendment.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

In that case, can I propose a subamendment on other items?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I don't think so.

The clerk just said no. We both agree on that.

Now we are talking about Mr. Nater's amendment to Ms. Khalid's motion.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

I can't propose an amendment to Ms. Khalid's motion?