Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West.
One of our primary duties as members of His Majesty's loyal opposition is to hold the federal government to account. Although the new Prime Minister wishes to reset the clock as if this were a new Liberal government, the reality is the team around him is made up of the same old scandal-plagued, tired Liberals, who are carry-overs from the previous era of Liberal incompetence.
Canada continues to face several challenges. There is a housing crisis, there is a crime crisis, there is a fentanyl crisis, there is a federal spending and debt crisis, and there are many more. Today Conservatives are here to speak about how the government wastefully spent taxpayer money on a project for which it did not even confirm if the work was completed. Those are not our words. That is the recent finding of the Auditor General when it came to the federal contracting of ArriveCAN, which inspired this headline in The Globe and Mail on June 10: “ArriveCan's main contractor GCStrategies paid without ensuring work was done”.
Although ArriveCAN was a Trudeau-era creation, its fallout is now the current Liberal government's problem. That is why I am here this afternoon. It is to take part in speaking to our common-sense Conservative motion, which states:
That, given that the Auditor General found that ArriveCAN contractor, GCStrategies Inc., was paid $64 million from the Liberal government, and in many cases, there was no proof that any work was completed, the House call on the government to:
(a) get taxpayers their money back, within 100 days of the adoption of this motion; and
(b) impose a lifetime contracting ban on GCStrategies Inc., any of its subsidiaries, its founders Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony, and any other entities with which those individuals are affiliated.
Truly, it is the least the Liberal government can do. Let me explain.
The impacts of the disastrous ArriveCAN app are still fresh in the minds of my constituents. The city of Niagara Falls and the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake are tourism communities located along the Canada-U.S. border. We are home to three international bridge crossings that span the Niagara River and connect Canada to the U.S. All three are part of the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission. There is the Queenston Lewiston Bridge in Niagara-on-the-Lake and both the Whirlpool Bridge and the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls. Together, these bridges facilitate trade, travel and tourism. They were also on the front lines of the two-year-long ArriveCAN app disaster, from 2020 to 2022.
When COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake were among the first and hardest hit by the consequences of restrictive government policies intending to preserve public health by slowing the virus's spread. The ArriveCAN app first launched on April 30, 2020, as a digital tool that was developed in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency.
Between November 21, 2020, and September 30, 2022, the mandatory use of ArriveCAN was aimed at ensuring that all travellers to Canada complied with federal travel and border measures relating to COVID-19. In theory, this app was supposed to help limit the spread of the coronavirus, but, in practice, it instantly turned into a disaster. My constituency office was inundated with phone calls and correspondence from constituents and travellers who were experiencing a wide range of issues with the app. Many travellers could not access or use ArriveCAN if they did not have a computer, a cellphone or a data plan. At times, data coverage on the border can be sketchy; travellers can also accidentally incur expensive roaming fees.
Language barriers were also a challenge, and seniors felt disproportionately targeted and discriminated against. The app failed on many occasions, when it glitched or faced other software issues. In fact, this is exactly what happened to Bernadette from my riding, a 75-year-old constituent at the time. Upon arriving in Canada from her trip to the U.S., Bernadette was told she would have to be quarantined for 14 days, despite being double-vaccinated and having a booster. Shortly after returning home, she began receiving threatening phone calls from the Government of Canada, harassing her to complete her testing requirements or face jail time and/or a $650,000 fine. Bernadette's case was not the only one. In fact, over 10,000 Canadians were wrongly ordered to quarantine as a result of a glitch in the ArriveCAN app.
This glitch created undue and significant emotional stress and impacted people's lives in different ways, whether it was having to give up work shifts, cancel appointments or miss important family events. In addition to the personal impacts that the dysfunctional ArriveCAN app caused people, there is also the economic cost. In March 2023, the international trade committee, which I sat on as a member, published a report on the economic impacts of ArriveCAN. It reads, “The Tourism Industry Association of Canada stated that the mandatory use of ArriveCAN and its requirements had a ‘massive effect’ on Canada’s tourism sector, resulting in ‘a drop of 50% or more in the number of Americans coming into the country.’”
Further, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority characterized the mandatory use of ArriveCAN as a “disincentive” and an “inconvenience” to discretionary travel. We felt these economic impacts in my region of Niagara. As a result of fewer American tourists arriving by auto, the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission experienced a 53% drop in auto crossings in June of 2022, compared to the same month in 2019.
In addition to lower volume, travel essentially came to a halt. The report says, “The Customs and Immigration Union compared the country’s land borders to ‘parking lots’”, as the mandatory use of the app at the borders caused processing times for all travellers arriving in Canada to skyrocket. As of June 15, 2022, the Customs and Immigration Union observed that CBSA officers were processing 30 cars per hour at the Canadian port of entry, compared to 60 cars per hour in the years preceding the pandemic.
Further, the wait times at the Rainbow Bridge rose from about one half hour during the 2019 Victoria Day weekend to just over two hours during the same weekend in 2022. These delays were felt not only at land borders; airports also experienced the pains and significant bottlenecks. In fact, the National Airlines Council of Canada stated that “following the requirement to use ArriveCAN, processing times for travellers at Canadian ports of entry were ‘about five times as long as they were before ArriveCAN’”.
In addition to the direct impacts of the app, there were also concerns being raised about why the federal government mandated the use of ArriveCAN for as long as it did. In the report, testimony provided by McMaster University's Dr. Zain Chagla shows he openly “questioned the continued mandatory use of [ArriveCAN] in spring 2022,” when some public health measures were being lifted in time to welcome the 2022 summer tourism season, which in Niagara is our peak tourism season.
Despite the measures' having been lifted, the Liberal government kept the mandatory use of ArriveCAN in place until the fall, when it finally made the app optional in October, 2022. This delayed action was a self-inflicted attack, there can be no other word for it, by the federal Liberals against the Canadian tourism industry, and it delayed any hope for a tourism recovery that year.
Although the costs we are discussing today in the motion focus on the GC Strategies contract, the personal and economic costs incurred by Canadians as a result of the broken and dysfunctional ArriveCAN app that was implemented by the reckless and careless Liberals are enormous, perhaps immeasurable, and they are not recoverable.
This is why our Conservative motion makes so much common sense. Getting Canadian taxpayers their money back and protecting Canadians from another arrive scam ever happening again by the same company or its founders is the least the Liberal government can do, and that is why I call on all my colleagues in the House to stand in support of the motion.