Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue, who has been fighting vigorously alongside me from the beginning.
The Cúram financial fiasco is about more than just numbers. It affects human beings, seniors who have worked their entire lives, citizens who have paid their taxes for decades. Now they are being forced to wait for the pensions they are entitled to. Pensions are not a luxury. They are a necessity and a right. However, because of the problems with the Cúram system, 63,000 seniors are currently in limbo, facing stress they should not have to endure.
Initially, the project was supposed to cost $1.75 billion. The total currently stands at $6.6 billion. The question is simple. How could a situation like this have been allowed to spiral so badly out of control? How does the minister explain the fact that the project's costs jumped from $1.75 billion to $6.6 billion without triggering effective oversight mechanisms? Who approved those cost overruns? How much more is this broken IT system going to cost taxpayers? It is a waste of public funds.
Our job is to responsibly manage the money that Canadians send here. It is important to remember that every dollar we spend here comes out of Canadians' pockets. As I said, the real scandal is not just the cost; it is the impact that this is having on people. Our seniors are the ones who are dealing with these delays and who now have unpaid bills. We know that the cost of groceries is problematic, and now some seniors' fridges are empty.
How many Canadians are still waiting for their benefits because of the Cúram system? What is the actual average wait time to process a file right now? We are hearing about an eight- or nine-month wait. The government must be judged by the results it achieves, not its intentions. Right now, it is not getting any results.
My biggest concern is that we have seen this scenario play out before with the Liberals. We had the major IT fiasco with the Phoenix system, and now, people are asking whether the government has learned from its mistakes. Have the Liberals learned from their mistakes? What concrete measures have been taken to ensure that Cúram does not turn into another Phoenix? Has the Liberal government put the lessons it learned from Phoenix into practice? If the government is ignoring the lessons of the past, it is dooming Canadians to relive the same mistakes, and that is unacceptable. A crisis of this magnitude demands transparency.
Canadians are entitled to know who made the decisions, who approved the contracts, who is currently supervising the decisions and the fiasco, and who is tracking the contracts. Are there any tracking dashboards in place? How many contracts have been awarded to external consultants, and how much are these contracts worth? Have administrative penalties been considered? It has emerged that some officials actually received performance bonuses. Is it not unbelievable that bonuses were paid? The public's trust can be earned, but it can also be lost quickly when there is no accountability.
Canadians do not just want explanations. They want solutions. They want to know when the situation is going to be resolved and what concrete plan is in place for stabilizing the Cúram platform. They want to know if there is a clear, publicly available timeline and how much more it will cost to fix the problem. We have heard about operating costs potentially jumping from $600 million per year to $1 billion per year. Were these costs budgeted for at the time the contract was awarded?
Licences for the Cúram platform will need to be renewed. Was that taken into account? Was employee training factored into the expenditures? This is a crisis without a plan, and the crisis is getting worse.
This file goes beyond technology. It has to do with trust. In politics, people's trust is the thing we hold most dear. We have to earn people's trust. We have to protect that trust and maintain credibility with our constituents. Right now, the Liberals' credibility in handling this crisis has been eroded.
I have been putting questions to the Prime Minister directly for two months now, because we are talking about the biggest financial scandal in history, with cost overruns of $5 billion. For two months, I have been asking the Prime Minister to show leadership, take charge of this file and get to the bottom of the matter to see what is not working, implement solutions and create a crisis task force. We need some dashboards from which to track progress and outcomes.
Taxpayers deserve that. Taxpayers deserve strong stewardship, efficient services and clear answers. Right now, we do not have clear answers. My colleague and I have just had a question and answer session with the minister and we do not have a clear answer. I asked the minister to go out into the field and meet employees who use the Cúram platform, who have been telling us that the platform is not working. I got a letter from an employee who, naturally, wants to remain anonymous. He wrote to tell me that things are not working and that we have not seen the worst of it. The letter came from a government employee who uses the platform, and he is telling us that this is just the tip of the iceberg. That is disturbing.
I reached out to the minister. I offered to work with her and to go meet with employees on the ground so she could explain the Cúram issues to us in person, and so that we could put a team together to get results. The answer was no. The minister refused my offer to go meet with the employees. However, we here in the opposition will not give up. We will continue to stand up for Canadians because they have a right to their pensions. It is their money. The government owes it to them. Seniors, who built Canada and who built Quebec, should not have to wait like this for months on end. We will always be there to defend them.
This is the biggest Liberal financial scandal ever. The Prime Minister needs to show some leadership out of respect for Canadians. He needs to take charge of this situation and shed light on this file so that our seniors can be paid for the work they have done to build this country.