Madam Speaker, before I begin, I wish to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with the member for Shefford. I also want to thank my colleague from the Bloc Québécois for moving the concurrence motion today. I believe this issue is truly important to Canadians. I am always happy to speak out against government waste.
I am very fortunate to have had the position of shadow minister for the Treasury Board for three and a half years. I am very grateful that the Leader of the Opposition gave me the role all that time ago. At the time, he told me it was a result not only of my Master of Business Administration degree but also of the time I had spent as a public servant within the federal government.
I have been following these issues and the waste for close to four years, and we see these consistent problems with the government time and time again. What I have learned is that Canadians hate two things. There are many other issues they disagree on or perhaps do not have consensus on, but Canadians hate waste, first of all, and they hate inefficiency. I have some data to support that. A poll by Arcus indicates that 73.9% of Canadians believe that the federal government is inefficient, and 50% believe in making government more efficient without reducing services. Canadians recognize the waste and inefficiency of the current government. This is something it has a very good track record of and has chosen time and time again in the many situations where they have failed.
Just this week, the Auditor General tabled her evaluation of modernizing the pay system. This is a major project, with $4.2 billion of Canadian taxpayer funds being used to overhaul the system, yet the government is failing. It is failing to do the transfer from the old system to the new system, and that is costing Canadians $4 million a year. Over several years, this is millions of dollars to add to the $4.2-billion project.
With that, it is a significant failure. There is currently still a backlog of 235,000 cases, with many of them more than a year old. The Auditor General went on to say that the government “need[s] to simplify and standardize pay rules before introducing a new system”, something the government should have learned from the Phoenix evaluation and the Phoenix fiasco but did not learn.
The government continues to waste Canadian taxpayer dollars and continues to be inefficient. Worst of all, it is not learning the lessons. We saw that in the presentation of the Auditor General's report on Monday, but not just there.
In 2025, the Auditor General also tabled the review of the ArriveCAN application. Again, her report showed more of the same, with the Liberals not having learned their lesson when it comes to being able to deliver effective and efficient services for Canadians. In addition, they have a significant problem enforcing their own rules. Not only are the Liberals incompetent, but they are also unable to provide a clear standard of service across their government when improving something or implementing something.
The examples in the ArriveCAN review included that 21% of the individuals who were brought in to work on the project lacked security clearance, 33% of contracts could not show contract resources had the experience and the qualifications needed to complete the required work, and 58% did not document assessment of evaluation of ongoing bids. Again, this is a waste. The Liberals are not doing a comparison of value for money to see whether they are receiving the best bid, the best value for money.
Fifty per cent of individuals in the sample did not have adequate security clearance, in addition to the 21% with no security clearance; 58% had poorly documented time sheets of individuals who submitted documents within the project; and 82% of federal organizations could not prove that fees did not exceed the market rates.
This is why the Liberals are failing as a government. They are incapable of achieving market rates, something that small businesses, medium-sized businesses and large corporations have as a practice and must do within Canada. The Liberals are not capable of doing it, and they are not capable of learning how to do it, as these repeated reports of failure keep coming in from the Auditor General and elsewhere.
In only 54% of contracts could the government prove that deliverables were received. When we go to the grocery store and pay for a tomato, we have the tomato. When we buy a T-shirt, we have the T-shirt. The government could not do this. It could not prove that it actually received what it had paid for.
We can point to another example if we go back to the 2024 ArriveCAN report, which stated that the Canada Border Services Agency, the Public Health Agency, and Public Services and Procurement Canada repeatedly failed to follow good management practices in the contracting, development and implementation of the ArriveCAN application. As a result of the many gaps and weaknesses, the Auditor General found issues with the project's design, oversight and accountability, and stated that it did not deliver the best value for the taxpayer dollars spent. Again we see the waste and the inefficiency.
The enduring benefit of the ArriveCAN application cannot be proven, and, thank goodness, as of October 2022, ArriveCAN has no longer been used to collect travellers' health and contact information, although I do think I have seen it recently. It goes further back than that, to the 2023 Auditor General report on the transformation of systems delivering critical benefits to Canadians, the benefits delivery modernization program, which had experienced repeated delays, cost increases and staff challenges since its launch in 2017.
We always hear the Liberals blaming the previous administration. They have had a decade now to clean up what was reported on the modernization pay system. There is a new system in addition to Phoenix, called Dayforce, which the Liberals are failing on as well. Going back to the benefits delivery modernization system, we are seeing failure in a benefits system, failure in a system that was supposed to help Canadians at a critical time in our history, and then failure for public servants in the pay system. There is a history of failure with the government.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, I have been in this role for a long time now, and I have consistently seen three problems with the government. I will summarize them.
Number one is that the government really likes to get its friends to do things. We saw this with McKinsey in the last Parliament. We could pull in so many different government departments, such as immigration, housing and infrastructure, that use their friends from McKinsey. If we go to our friend, are we going to get a good deal? No, we are not. The government wants to help its close friends and insiders. The Canadian taxpayer loses. The Canadian taxpayer does not benefit when the government gets a good deal for its friend.
Number two is that the Liberals are incapable of maintaining a project within its scope and not having an overrun. All three of the examples in the reports I have mentioned today have shown overruns and a lack of capacity to get things done efficiently, on time and within the parameters that were described.
Finally, number three, is that no one in the government ever takes accountability. It is always the last administration's fault or some director general's fault. We saw this with ArriveCAN. The government would rather ruin the life of an individual than take accountability for the mistakes it made.
We see time and time again with the current government that it is incapable of efficiency, and it does nothing but waste the money of the taxpayer. All these examples prove it. I am happy to stand up here and talk on and on about that today, because it is so easy to.