Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today about the eighth report of the Auditor General that we studied in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. This report was tabled nearly three years ago, but a great many of its observations remain very problematic. Border management is still a serious problem, and that is what I would like to address today in the House.
As we learn in grade 10 at age 15 or 16, Canada was founded on the basis of certain broad principles. One of them is the separation of powers, established at the Charlottetown Conference of 1864. It was decided at the time that there would be a separation of powers, with a view to forming a confederation. Powers over services often delivered by the clergy or women, such as education and health, were left to the provinces, while it was incumbent on the federal government to deliver some of the most important public services, especially at the time, including border control and defence.
During my three and a half years as a member, I have had to rise in the House to criticize the work of the Canada Border Services Agency too many times, work that comes under federal jurisdiction. I feel it behooves us, therefore, to discuss some of these failures today. Let us begin by considering the report at hand, entitled “Report 8: Pandemic Preparedness, Surveillance, and Border Control Measures”. According to this report, border management was rather chaotic, and quarantine management perhaps even more so.
Here is an example. The rollout of border management measures was very slow. The federal government is so out of touch, that the City of Montreal had to dispatch its own personnel to manage the Montréal-Trudeau airport. This is an outrage. I recall watching television and wondering what the government was doing. It was doing absolutely nothing, so the cities had to send their own personnel to handle passengers. If passengers exhibited symptoms, staff tried to ensure they at least had masks to protect themselves and the people around them.
Here is another example. At that point, Quebec Premier Legault had repeatedly called on the federal government to restrict the entry of non-essential travellers. It is not known what happened, but once again Ottawa was slow off the mark, failing to grasp what was going on. The border was not closed to non-essential travel in time. When, at long last, thanks to pressure from the opposition parties and the public, the government woke up and began imposing border restrictions, it was not a pretty sight. My colleagues remember it as well as I do, no doubt. It is as though the government wanted to showcase its mismanagement.
The Auditor General has released a number of reports on the government's management during the pandemic, and the most recent one addresses how the Canada Emergency Business Account was administered. I will come back to this later, but in her first report, released in 2021, the Auditor General stated that in 37% of cases, Ottawa was unable to tell whether people had complied with their quarantine orders or not. Still, this failure is an improvement over the 66% of cases in the 2020 report. This means that the government put a quarantine management system in place to avoid a situation where travellers arriving from other countries would bring the virus with them and spread it upon their arrival. In 66% of cases, no one knew whether people had followed quarantine orders in 2020. By 2021, some progress had been made: No one knew whether people had followed quarantine orders in nearly 40% of cases.
According to the 2021 report, 30% of border screening test results were either missing or could not be matched to a case file. Ottawa had no automated registry to track those who had to quarantine in a hotel, and it was unknown whether they had done so. The records that the agency had to verify hotel stays covered only 25% of travellers arriving by air. Once again, I say bravo. Priority follow-ups received no response for 59% of the people who needed them, despite the referrals to law enforcement. In addition, 14% of people who had tested positive for COVID-19 were not contacted by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Even people who showed a positive result upon arrival were not contacted by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Once again, these are only a few examples of the government's mismanagement.
There were also problems related to our official languages. Every time there is a problem concerning the official languages, that means that there are no services available in French. Several of the companies charged with screening did not offer services in French. It is amazing: Once again it is obvious that our official languages are very low on the list of priorities. French comes after absolutely everything else. That is how committed the government really is.
We could also talk about the ArriveCAN app, which was the subject of a hefty Auditor General's report. Let us start with how it worked. The ArriveCAN app erroneously told people they needed to follow quarantine orders when that was not the case. There was unequal access for people who did not have a cell phone or a cell data plan. There was an endless number of bugs that prevented people from accessing the app. Also, as we all know, this app cost far too much, some $60 million, instead of the $800,000 it should have cost—