Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The curtains are not soundproof. People should know that.
The committee unanimously adopted a report about a particularly troubling issue. This is the report: “That the committee report to the House that it calls on the government to prohibit any government employee from simultaneously working as an external contractor”.
It is like asking a young student to do their homework. It is as simple and basic as that. For years, a public servant employed by what is supposed to be one of the most secure departments, the Department of National Defence, was also working as a subcontractor for that department and for other departments as well. How could the government let that happen? It is not very encouraging that the Standing Committee on Public Accounts had to make this kind of request.
Let us talk about this. I will go over the context surrounding ArriveCAN. I do not think we have talked enough about it yet, because there is still no accountability when it comes to what happened with ArriveCAN. No ministers or agency heads have taken responsibility. No one has taken responsibility for the ArriveCAN fiasco.
I will remind members of what happened. In early 2024, the Office of the Auditor General published a report on the management of the ArriveCAN application. The Auditor General described it as the worst bookkeeping she had seen in her career. The ArriveCAN app was supposed to cost $80,000, but ended up costing $60 million.
The Auditor General's report took a fairly extensive look at the role of GC Strategies in this whole business. It also discussed Dalian, the second company that received the largest share of funding in this affair. The Auditor General reported that Dalian had pocketed $7.9 million, which Dalian's owner refuted, claiming that the Auditor General did not know how to count. That is a new one. He said that his company received only $4.9 million. However, for a one-person company, that still seems like a lot to pay for an app initially expected to cost only $80,000.
What we are discovering with the ArriveCAN file is that this saga is just the tip of the iceberg and there are various issues at stake, including the one we are talking about today in this committee report, namely, double-dipping. It really just means that two things are done simultaneously. Here, it means being paid by taxpayers twice for the same hours of work. I do not believe that anyone can work effectively 24 hours a day, even if they say they are working multiple jobs. It is just not possible.
It is only natural, then, in a self-respecting, healthy democracy for parliamentarians to be responsible for ensuring that the government functions properly. It is only natural for us to take a closer look at what may have happened and, above all, to ensure that it does not happen again. Clearly, if it has come to this, that means there are huge procurement problems within the federal government.
That is how the government has been operating for at least 15 years now. It is so difficult to get onto the pre-selected list of companies that the government deals with a lot of small companies that do not actually provide any services at all, but merely act as intermediaries to find subcontractors that will ultimately provide services to the government. The government started investing huge sums. It tripled or even quintupled the number of contracts being offered to consultants. Often, it was done through these agencies, which ultimately just inflate the price of the service that taxpayers receive.
The government has to pay these agencies a commission. The Dalian CEO we are talking about today, Mr. Yeo, claims to have pocketed a commission of 12% to 20% for providing no service other than finding subcontractors. Often, these subcontractors had already been found by government officials. In the end, taxpayers pay far more than they should with a dysfunctional federal apparatus.
Moreover, the federal government has hired a lot more civil servants. Often, the civil servants and the subcontractors were the same people. It is still happening today. In the end, we pay more than twice. We pay for the subcontractors, we pay for the employees, who bill us for practically the same hours, and, on top of that, we hire more civil servants to manage the subcontractors we already pay as employees. Do people realize how absurd this is?
We are talking about a company that took advantage of a broken system and pushed that advantage to the extreme.
Let us briefly look at who David Yeo is. He has owned Dalian since 2001 and, according to his own LinkedIn page, he has been a subcontractor for the Department of National Defence since 1987. Dalian has received $200 million from the federal government since 2015. Another company, Coradix, bought a 49% stake in Dalian. The two companies shared the same offices. The owners of Coradix were actually also the directors of Dalian. I will come back to Coradix a little later, but there was also a connection with Coradix.
More specifically, in the ArriveCAN affair, on September 19, 2023, David Yeo was hired by the Department of National Defence. He signed a contract with the Department of National Defence. He had to fill out a conflict of interest declaration form. On September 28, nine days later, a contract was signed between that same department, the Department of National Defence, and Dalian. Who signed that contract? It was signed by David Yeo, the same David Yeo who had started working at the Department of National Defence nine days earlier.
On October 31, last fall, while working as a full-time employee at the Department of National Defence, Mr. Yeo appeared before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates as the owner of Dalian. When I asked the Department of National Defence representatives how one of their employees could appear before the committee without anyone noticing, they just laughed and said they did not really watch parliamentary committees. Public servants had the nerve to say this to members of a parliamentary committee who were asking them why the same person was being paid twice for working the same hours. They do not watch parliamentary committees. It is shameful.
On February 28, the department learned about the relationship between its new employee, Mr. Yeo, and Dalian, one of its frequent subcontractors. It was not until March 5 that David Yeo resigned from the Department of National Defence.
We also learned from media reports, which we corroborated using various sources, that Mr. Yeo has accounts in tax havens. Obviously, when we received Mr. Yeo in committee, we asked him about that. Mr. Yeo's answer was staggering. I asked him about his tax haven accounts and he said that he was interested in international business and how business is done in other countries, like Bermuda or whatever other Caribbean island interested him. He was interested in learning how business is conducted over there. He would go around opening accounts just for the fun of it. I am not even joking. That is exactly what he told me. He likes doing business in tax havens. There we have it, a tiny glimpse into the character of the person we are discussing today.
Here is another example involving a company. I mentioned the commissions that some companies were paying even though they did not deliver any services at all. There was the case of one well-known company, one of the “Big Four”, KPMG, which received an $80,000 commission for GC Strategies. Again, this was in the ArriveCAN case. Civil servants had settled on KPMG as the company capable of delivering the services. However, an official said that the government did not want to sign a contract directly with KPMG, even though KPMG had already been pre-selected. The government preferred to go through GC Strategies. In the end, taxpayers paid even though the company that was to provide the services had already been found. Taxpayers still paid an $84,000 commission to GC Strategies, even without GC Strategies providing the service it had offered, which was to find the subcontractor. The subcontractor had already been found. That $84,000 commission was pure theft.
I think the most important point of the report we are debating today is that it was adopted unanimously in the House. That is because it is so self-evident. It reflects a feeling that Quebeckers, and Canadians for that matter, experience quite often these days on a regular basis: the feeling of being cheated.
Yes, there was the ArriveCAN affair. I would also very much like to talk about the saga of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, but I think that even my own colleagues are a bit fed up with hearing about it. I am going to do it anyway, though, because I believe it is a very important issue.
My colleague from Beauport—Limoilou's questions beautifully sum up what I have been trying to explain to the House for months. We are paying double for everything. The federal government is interfering in Quebec's areas of jurisdiction while mismanaging its own areas. Just look at the passport saga or the Canada Revenue Agency. It is all so poorly managed, yet it is a federal responsibility. The government is hiring consultants to help it operate more efficiently, while also expanding the public service. Under the nose of government officials, some people have decided to double-dip, probably thinking that there will be no consequences. This is a huge problem. The public service seems corrupt, and that is a big problem. Ultimately, some people are double-dipping.
As I said earlier, average citizens feel they are being cheated. I mentioned two scandals, but there are so many other examples. I am not even going to touch on Conservative scandals, but I could. I have a little list here.
We could talk about the sponsorship scandal of 2002. We could talk about Chinese billionaires donating to the Liberal Party of Canada in order to have a chat with the Prime Minister. We could talk about the Prime Minister's fashion faux pas in various countries where, actually, those clothes cost quite a bit of money. We could talk about the SNC-Lavalin scandal and WE Charity. We could talk about ArriveCAN. We could talk about the travel expenses scandal, about the $190,000 spent on food and airfare for a single trip, the $160,000 spent on a Christmas holiday vacation in Jamaica and the $1,660,000 spent on a trip to India. We could talk about the scandal involving the member for Edmonton Centre, the former employment and official languages minister, who just resigned. We could talk about the SDTC scandal. Once again, we are talking tens of millions of dollars.
What I found out about SDTC and what was revealed last week in committee is quite serious. The former chair of the SDTC board was investing in what is known as a venture capital fund. She was investing in a venture capital fund that was investing in companies that were receiving money from the government. She was getting richer as a result, and she got richer still from the money she obtained from the government. I do not know what people want to call it, but if that is not a scandal, then I do not know what is. However, maybe people are used to scandals by now.
Let us also talk about Coradix, the firm that partnered with Dalian and whose owners have a 49% stake in Dalian. Do members know that Coradix is now suing the government? It takes a lot of nerve to sue the government for the contracts that have been suspended. It was Coradix's ties to David Yeo, the founding president of the consulting firm, that cost the company its bread and butter. The contracts were suspended. The two companies had formed a joint venture to get contracts that were being awarded to indigenous entrepreneurs because David Yeo belongs to one such community. They shared offices in downtown Ottawa, had the same chair for their respective boards of directors and managed a total of 475 IT consultants for the federal government in return for the lucrative commissions that I mentioned earlier. Coradix was well aware of Mr. Yeo's activities, but it did not say anything and continued to bid on tenders. There were tons of people who knew what was going on and simply said nothing.
Now this company has had the nerve to come and ask the government for financial compensation for the suspended contracts, even though they knew that the company's owner, who owns 49% of the shares, was double-dipping. They came and asked for compensation for that, compensation for turning a blind eye, essentially. It was not about getting reimbursed for previous contracts. It was about future contracts being suspended. Obviously, there will be no future contracts. They thought that was too harsh a punishment for turning a blind eye to the highly reprehensible act of stealing from taxpayers.
In that regard, I really hope the government takes a hard line on this. It is doing things that make it look a bit ridiculous. Let us hope that it does not get any more ridiculous, that it does not go so far as to pay this company again for turning a blind eye to this reprehensible misuse of taxpayer money. I really hope the government takes a hard line. I do not want the tax dollars of my constituents, Quebeckers and Canadians to be used to reimburse such a company.
In closing, respect for institutions is very important in a healthy democracy. I repeat that often in the House because it seems to be forgotten. It is one scandal after another right now, and the public is feeling cheated. The media is not even reporting on the SDTC scandal anymore, except for the fact that it is obstructing the work of the House. This is a major scandal, though. Maybe ordinary people feel like it is just another scandal.
What is going to happen next week when the Auditor General releases her new reports? Will the public and the media feel jaded and say that it is just another Liberal scandal?
I hope not. It really is important for people to stay informed and take an interest in what is going on at the federal level, in how their money is being managed. In a healthy democracy, it is fundamental for people to have confidence in their institutions.
What I really want today is to remind the government that such a self-evident report must be respected. It was important to move concurrence in this report in the House, however. It is a matter of maintaining confidence in our institutions. That is the foundation of democracy.