Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, February 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, that is a good question.

I have a lot of questions about the Conservative leader's positions. For example, to me, his decision to vote against supporting Ukraine was unacceptable.

The leader of the Conservative Party claims to be the leader of accountability, except when it comes to connections to lobbyists. With the Conservatives, it is an open bar for lobbyists.

[Business of Supply, February 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, if I were to go back to Timmins—James Bay and say, “Hey, guess what, the Liberals screwed up again, and this time it is ArriveCan, so we are not going to go ahead with national dental care and we are not going to go ahead with pharmacare”, I would get laughed out of the room.

My focus is that we are going to force the government to deliver on things that are absolutely making it twist in the wind, thanks to a few percentage points over the Liberals in the polls right now, as they never would have come to the table on national pharmacare.

On these scandals, the Canadian public expects us to go beyond synthetic outrage to say, “What happened?” and “How was that money spent?”. As I said earlier, I was part of the investigation into Baylis Medical. I did not find anything that was problematic. If I had, I would have said so, but I did not. However, with the WE group we found major problems. We found major problems with ArriveCan. As my colleague, the member for Courtenay—Alberni, said, we need to scratch the surface on all contracting now, because there is an amazing amount of taxpayers' money that is being misspent through this process.

[Business of Supply, February 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. I think the member should be asking the minister in charge of the file how the heck that happened.

The issue is that the government is giving out enormous sums of money to groups like McKinsey, which has a very dodgy record on everything from opioids to articles in the United States saying that this is the company that destroyed the American middle class. Nonetheless, we give them millions of dollars even though we have a trained civil service that is dedicated and can do the job.

I cannot imagine that ArriveCAN would have gotten off the ground as far as it did if we had mechanisms in place. However, I want to be fair. I do not have a problem that the government tried to get ArriveCAN, and I do not have a problem that it tried to bring in people to get it done, because we were in unprecedented circumstances. My problem is where the heck was the oversight once it began to realize that this thing was not going to work?

[Business of Supply, February 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise, and I will be sharing my time with the member for Courtenay—Alberni.

The question of how public money is spent or misspent is a fundamental question of an obligation for parliamentarians, because the Canadian people do not need to pay attention to everything that happens in Parliament. However, they need to know that there is accountability and that we respect their hard-working money being spent properly and through the right channels.

I have many years of experience in the House dealing with all the smut and corruption files that have come along. I was elected in my first year as the Liberal government was telling us that Jean Chrétien's golf balls were going to keep the country together. Fortunately, the Canadian people did not believe that. That was the first scandal I witnessed. I have lost track of all the scandals.

We can take misspending and put it into various categories. There are simply the tawdry ones, like with Bev Oda, who seemed to rack up as many bills as possible every time she travelled until people finally became fed up. There was the issue with Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright, where Mike Duffy was claiming all kinds of outrageous claims because he was a bagman and raised money for the Conservatives. We were presented with this bizarre case that it was okay to offer a secret bribe, but it was a problem to receive the bribe.

Those scandals did not just belong to the Conservatives. There was Mac Harb, a Liberal, who had this amazing grifter scheme. He was not eligible for travel, so he bought this dodgy little broken down cottage just 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa because if he lived 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa, he could hit up the taxpayer for all kinds of travel, even though, I was told, there was not even running water at that cottage. Mac Harb had to pay back $231,000.

People deserve to be outraged by that abuse, and it raised questions in the Senate of where the accountability is to make sure that the people who are there are doing their jobs. I remember Tony Clement and the $50 million that was taken out of border funds so that he could buy sunken boats and build a fake lake in Muskoka. That was an abusive process. It was not criminal; it was an abusive process.

There was the issue with Arthur Porter, which was one of the more concerning scandals I have witnessed over the years. Stephen Harper appointed him as head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and made him a privy councillor. We then, of course, found out he was involved in what CBC said was “the biggest fraud investigation in Canadian history”, and he ended up dying in Panama in a jail.

Those are elements of criminality, “griftership”, tawdriness and of people just misusing the public funds.

The ArriveCAN thing needs to be put in perspective of the time, and then analyze it from there. When we were hit with the pandemic, we were dealing with a completely unknown crisis that none of us had faced, and there was certainly a need to get a response out the door quickly.

Who did the best job at that? It was our public servants. They basically spent that Easter weekend in 2020 creating a program to get the CERB dollars out to people who were not able to work and to keep them going. It was the Public Service who did good, amazing work during that time.

However, there were a number of scandals that came up during that period, and ArriveCAN fits into that because it is a question of the lack of oversight and accountability. Certainly, Canadians deserve to know how a contract worth $59.5 million, divided up through 32 companies, for a program that did not work was allowed to go ahead. We ask ourselves how that was possible.

I would like to share with my colleagues some of the recommendations that came out of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which looked into some of the other elements. We looked at Baylis Medical, at Palantir and at the Kielberger brothers. At the time, again, the government wanted to get a youth program out. There was $500 million to $940 million set aside for the Kielberger operation without competition and without very clear oversight. What the committee found was that the incredible access Marc and Craig Kielberger had into the inner workings of government gave them an advantage no one else had.

I would encourage any of my colleagues to read the Ethics Commissioner report on the former finance minister, Bill Morneau. It makes for a pretty shocking reading that these guys had an all-access pass into the corridors of the Liberal government and were not even registered to lobby. That certainly was a major factor in bringing down Mr. Morneau.

I want to raise this because if we have these scandals, we need to learn from them. We need to learn how money was misspent. We need to learn why there was no oversight, so that this is not repeated. Otherwise we become a laughingstock of repetition of failure from insiders, from misuse of public funds and from contracting out.

With respect to the contracting out that was to be done with the WE group, I am going to read what the all-party committee said. This is not my opinion but that of all of the political parties that participated. It reported this back to Parliament:

The Committee was unable to find any due diligence reports that actually tested the credibility of the claims made by the WE Charity. This group had never undertaken a project close to this magnitude and it remains unclear whether they had the means to ensure that students across the country could be put to work with credible results.

It was going to be given $500 million initially, and there were no due diligence reports that we could find anywhere. Then we found out that the money was going to be funnelled to a shell company initially set up to deal with some of its incredible real estate holdings. How is it possible that the Government of Canada would transfer between $500 million and $940 million to a shell company? Who was taking the enormous risk then? It was the Canadian people. I am going to read from the all-party committee report again:

The Committee is of the view that the decision of the Liberal government of Canada to sign a contract worth over $500 million with a shell company “WE Charity Foundation” is deeply troubling. The WE group stated they used the shell company to limit their liability. In reality, this procedure had the potential to put a huge investment of taxpayers funds at risk because the deal was with a shell company with no assets.

How does a G7 country sign on to something that concerning?

I am raising this because of the whole thing about ArriveCAN and the Auditor General's not being able to find anything on how the money was spent. One of the most disturbing factors is that after 10 months of study, we had to report to Parliament that we had no idea how the finances of the supposed children's charity worked. We could not tell the Canadian people who controlled its multitude of corporations. We did not even know all the companies that it controlled. We could not tell the difference between its so-called charity work and its for-profit work, or tell what its ownership structure was, yet the government, without doing due diligence, was going to sign over between $500 million and $940 million.

The report states:

The Committee notes that over the 10 months of its study, it was unable to get a clear picture of the financial structure of the WE group. We were unable to ascertain a clear division between how monies flowed through the charitable wing and their for-profit operations. We were also denied information on the ownership structure of their multitude of side companies. If the government of Canada is to sign future contracts or contribution agreements with WE Charity, its affiliates or subsidiaries, such clarifications must be required.

I raise that because we are looking at a very similar thing that happened with ArriveCAN. Where was the oversight?

This is the other question I am going to end on. We spent 10 months trying to get the CFO of WE to testify, just to tell us what was happening. We were told not only that he was on medical leave but also that he had a brain aneurism that, if we asked him questions, might cause his death. Certainly nobody in Parliament was going to wish that someone die under the pressure, but the WE group could not come up with anybody else who could explain its very complex financial structure.

On May 15, 2021, we received a letter from Mr. Li saying that he was too sick, had not been doing any work and was completely uninvolved, yet we found that in that period, in the state of California, there was a registration renewal in November 2020 on which he signed off as CFO. There was a New York state filing on which he signed off as CFO, an Internal Revenue Service report in 2020 and a Washington State report. All of these were signed off on by Victor Li, yet our committee was told that he was so fragile and sick that he could not even read documents. We were not in a position to do a criminal investigation, but we had to report back to Parliament that there had been a major failure of fundamental accountability.

Has the government learned lessons from what happened with the WE brothers, or do we have to repeat these tawdry, dumbed-down abuses of public funds because the accountability mechanisms that should have been there were ignored and the Canadian taxpayer is on the hook? I will be here all week.

[Business of Supply, February 27th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I was on the committee that looked into the spending. We looked at Baylis Medical. We looked at Palantir. We looked at WE Charity. We found no evidence on Baylis. There were certainly many questions about WE, but the question about the spending on ArriveCAN, to me, is a question of a lack of oversight. The $59 million could have been spent on 32 different contractors.

Where was the accountability? Even in the midst of a pandemic, when we were trying to get money out the door to get tools that could help, this is an issue of a fundamental failure of oversight, and I think that is the question we need to focus on.

[Shannen Koostachin, February 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, we are on the 12th anniversary of Parliament's passing the “Shannen's Dream” motion, named in honour of the young Cree leader Shannen Koostachin, who stood up to challenge the systemic denial of rights for indigenous children. Shannen had never seen a real school. Children in Attawapiskat were being educated in squalid and dangerous conditions.

The government knew this. It just did not give a damn.

Thirteen-year-old Shannen launched the largest youth-driven civil rights movement in Canadian history. Shannen never lived long enough to see the beautiful school that was built because of her work. She died in a horrific car accident at 15.

Following her death, youth, activists and educators from across Canada launched “Shannen's Dream” to end the systemic underfunding of first nations schools. We have so much farther to go. Children in Eabametoong have no school right now. Children in Kashechewan have no proper gym.

Shannen reminded us that the greatest resource in this country is not oil or diamonds; it is in the potential of this young generation. We thank her. The fight for justice continues.

[Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings, February 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, my Conservative colleague is correct, and it is unfair to make these comparisons. The leader of the Conservatives was in the House to vote against Ukraine.

[Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings, February 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative member then made personal attacks against the Prime Minister. We need to focus on the motion at hand—

[Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings, February 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I am very wary in doing this. I do not think I have ever made a point of order while interrupting a colleague's speech, whose speech is very important, but it is important to raise my concern. This is about a motion instructing the House to be able to get legislation finished, particularly Bill C-50, which has seen a lot of obstruction.

In the previous exchange between the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle and the Liberal member, the Liberal member accused him of getting his children's private school funding covered by the Conservative Party, which I do not think is part of the motion, but I—

[Government Orders No. 35—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings, February 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I know that we are not supposed to say when someone is not in the House, and it should be fair. The leader of the Conservative Party did show up in time to vote against Ukraine. Then he went home.