Garnett Genuis

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Chair, I think it is pretty clear from that answer that the minister thinks there are some cases where it is acceptable to double-dip as a government employee and a contractor. If he does not think that, he can say so, but I think that is pretty troubling.

I have another question: Does the minister think that companies that do work for hostile foreign regimes should also be able to simultaneously do work for the Government of Canada?

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Chair, am I to infer from the answer that the minister thinks there are some instances where it is okay for a public servant to also be an external contractor?

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Chair, it is just a really simple question about the minister's philosophy in terms of how he thinks things should work. Does the minister think a person who is employed by the public service should be able to simultaneously work as an external contractor? It is the third time I have asked the question. Could the minister answer it? Does he think that is appropriate, yes or no?

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Chair, does the minister think that people who work for the public service should be able to work as external contractors at the same time as they are employed by the public service?

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Chair, does the minister think that people who work for the public service should be able to work as external contractors at the same time as they are employed by the public service?

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, this question underlines the problem with the Liberals in regard to whose side they are really on. We can compare the way they treat elite insiders who have abused the rules and taken money from taxpayers versus what would happen to everyday Canadians who might have a dispute with CRA, for example, about what is owed. The gentleness with which the government approaches elite insider contractors, even those who have flagrantly broken the rules, versus how ordinary Canadians are treated, shows that, in fact, the Liberals are persistently on the side of their elite insider friends.

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I can say that we did a lot of work with whistle-blowers on this file. I am sorry that I do not remember the individual that the member mentioned, but I can say that we worked really hard with the other opposition parties.

We worked really hard to try to force the government to answer these questions. It was clear that the government was going to take its time answering them, but the opposition parties had to take action to bring about change.

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I was surprised to hear such a sharp question from my colleague, because I thought I was very generous in my speech in giving the government this opportunity to vote in favour of our motion. This opposition motion is a gift to the government. We are inviting them to come along with us and vote in favour of getting this money back from GC Strategies. I think this is the kind of offer of collaboration that people are looking for. I would challenge the government; it is supposed to be new.

Here is the point: I suspect the Liberals will vote against this motion in the end, but I would challenge them to do the right thing. The member wants to know how we can work together. Vote in favour of this motion. That is how we can work together. That is what we need.

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, this is a hypothetical, and a ridiculous hypothetical, but ridiculous hypotheticals are required to demonstrate what has actually gone on in government procurement. For example, someone hires me for $100 to paint the fence. I hire someone else for $50 to paint the fence. I collect $50 for doing, you guessed it, nothing. If this happens over and over again to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, we get kind of a sense of the procurement system that has been operating under the government.

We are talking about GC Strategies today, but it is important for members and people at home to understand that there are hundreds of companies that do staff augmentation work in the IT space alone. We had these two guys working out of their basement, and they had a great business model. They got contracts, then hired someone else to do the work, and they collected a massive fee in the middle. It is not only Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony from GC Strategies who are doing this work; there are hundreds of companies doing staff augmentation for the federal government in IT alone. This is a profoundly broken system.

First, the government makes procurement so complicated, so unwieldy, that almost nobody can understand it, and then we have people who position themselves as experts in nothing except getting contracts. In other words, they are people who have the relationships, they have the access, they know how to host the right whisky tastings for the right people, which is a real thing that happened. They know how to host the right whisky tastings, and so they know how to get government contracts. Once they get the government contracts, they go on LinkedIn and find the people who actually know how to do this work, and then they hire them.

Mr. Speaker, it is like something out of Yes Minister, but it would be rejected by that show for being too unrealistic. This is what actually happens and has happened for the last 10 years under the Liberal government. However, now the government has changed and will never do it again. The Liberals have a new government, with the same people who have nonetheless seen the errors of their ways.

When all else fails in this debate, members across the way say, “Well, yeah, but didn't we win an election? We won an election after all.” Nobody is disputing the results of the election, but I do think it is notable that in order to win the last election, the Liberals had to pretend to be something very different from what they had been for the last 10 years. Their only argument in the election was to say, “Well, Canadians want change, and we've changed too. We'll be nothing like ourselves.” They promised to be nothing like themselves, and that turned out to be a reasonably successful political strategy. However, I think very soon Canadians will discover that the Liberals are actually not nothing like themselves, that they are actually more like themselves than they pretended to be, and that we will see the continuation of these same absurdist procurement policies, things that if presented as the possible script for a television show would be rejected for being unrealistic.

We have people getting hired to hire other people, with a procurement system that is so broken and so complicated that only well-connected insider brokers can understand it. Those well-connected insider brokers receive the contracts, hire the people and collect a massive premium for doing so. This week, the Auditor General came out with a report, having looked in detail into what happened with this one particularly notorious company, GC Strategies, and found there was massive abuse.

One highlight from the committee exchanges we had with the owners of GC Strategies is that they admitted to presenting fraudulent resumés to the Government of Canada in order to get work. It is the old resumé padding that we all tell our children not to do; this is how GC Strategies was getting contracts. They explained what their normal process was. They would get a resumé that may not be compliant with the requirements of the bid, and then they adjusted the resumé to make it compliant.

Let us say the contract required that a person had five years' experience at something, but the person they were proposing to do the work actually only had five months' experience. They would change the months to years to make it compliant and then go back to the original resource, the person who would do the work, and say, “Is this okay with you? We changed the numbers here.” In one case, they forgot to consult the resource before they changed those numbers, and that is where they got caught out, because the resource called them out for it.

Before the committee, Kristian Firth admitted that it was a standard part of their process to adjust people's resumés to make them line up with the expectations of a contract and then check in to see if it was okay. Again, if this was a pitch for a Yes Minister episode, it would be rejected for being unrealistic. However, this is par for the course in the broken procurement system of the Liberals.

To cover for this, the Liberals cycle through different procurement ministers. The same people are cycled around. “Oh, it is a new minister. It is a new minister.” Almost every six months on procurement, it has been a new minister who is not responsible for anything that was previously done. Meanwhile, the previous minister goes on to remain in some influential role in the government. It is a farce and a tragedy, and Canadian taxpayers are getting abused as a result of it.

The Liberals profess to be a new government; they have changed. As I said, today is their opportunity. We have put forward a motion that says GC Strategies should be banned from ever getting government contracts and they should pay the money back. It is not that difficult; if companies abuse contracting rules, falsify resumés and do not actually do the work, then they should pay back the money they took from taxpayers.

If our friends across the way have truly changed, they should vote for this motion. It would be a great demonstration, not just if they vote for it, but if they actually follow through on it. We have had instances where they vote for motions and then do not follow through on them. This is their opportunity to vote for a motion and then act on it. We have been asking them today, are they prepared to vote in favour of this motion?

The Liberals are trying to fill this debate with a great fog of nonsense and distraction. I welcome the member for Winnipeg North and am looking forward to receiving that gust of fog. My question for them is, will they support our motion to pay the money back? If they are the new Liberal Party, then I think they would vote for this motion to order the money back. If they are voting against this motion, then it will demonstrate, of course, that they are the same old Liberals, unchanged as they have always been.

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, what is going on here? We have a 10-year-old government that is neck deep in corruption. It is another week and another Auditor General report denouncing the actions of the government, a government that really wants to profess to be new. It is a new government, but not new people. It is the same people, but they have changed. They have found religion. They are going to do things differently from now on, this same group of people.

As this motion demonstrates, the Liberals have an opportunity to demonstrate the genuineness of their conversion. We have made it easy for them today. We have put forward a motion they can vote for that will show they are in fact different from the way they were before. This is their opportunity. How helpful we are, as a Conservative opposition, to give them an opportunity to demonstrate the sincerity of their apparent conversion by voting in favour of this motion.

I will give a bit of background for those who are just joining us. Today we are debating a motion from the Conservative Party opposition that calls on the government to demand the return of money that was improperly taken by GC Strategies. GC Strategies is a two-person company that received tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. What it does is something called staff augmentation. If I had known about this, I might have gone into that business instead of going into politics, because it is a really good deal.

Here is how it works: A person is hired to do a job, and they hire someone else to do that job but pay them less than the person received in the first place. Let us say I am hired to paint someone's fence, and I am paid $100 to do that. I then hire the member for Waterloo to paint the fence, and I give her $50 of that $100. The person who hired me had their fence painted for $100, and the other member has earned—