Madam Speaker, this is the time of the parliamentary day when we change agenda items. We go from discussing one Liberal corruption scandal to discussing a different corruption scandal, so it is a completely different mind frame. Previously, we were talking about the Liberal green slush fund scandal. Now I am going to follow up on a question I had asked about the arrive scam scandal. There is an expression: same stuff, different day. We see so much corruption under the NDP-Liberal government.
We continue to see new revelations in the arrive scam scandal. Right now, the government operations committee is doing a study on the Liberal indigenous contracting scandal. This is a scandal involving how Liberals misused the indigenous contracting system to allow well-connected, in many cases non-Indigenous, elites to take and benefit from resources that were supposed to be going to support indigenous communities. We had testimony from the AFN that suggested that a very small percentage of those allotments for indigenous contracting are actually going to real indigenous companies. This is another contracting scandal the government operations committee is investigating, but it comes out of the arrive scam scandal.
The arrive scam scandal, which revealed just how broken government contracting was, involved $60 million being spent on a glitchy app that did not work very well. A company was hired to build this app, GC Strategies, which is not an IT company. It does not actually build apps. The Liberals thought they would hire someone to build an app and went to a company that does not build apps. It was two people in a basement. What they did was receive the contract and pass it on, so the government went and hired someone who went and hired other people. One of the companies that got business as part of this was Dalian Enterprises, a company on the government's indigenous contracting list, but also a company that did not actually do any work on it. It simply received contracts and subcontracted. Part of the corruption we are seeing is that the government is using tiny companies, made up of well-connected insiders, that receive contracts and then subcontract.
The concept of this is very simple. Hypothetically, let us say that I needed to have someone come in to replace my bathtub, so I went out and hired someone. I pay them a certain amount of money, but they do not actually produce bathtubs or know anything about them. This person simply gets the contract from me and goes out to subcontract it, to buy a bathtub from someone else and then sell it to me for a markup.
That is what happened with ArriveCAN. A company was hired. It took the contract, hired someone else to do the work, and got the contract at a markup. It does not make a lot of sense in the interest of taxpayers that this would happen, but well-connected insiders have continually profited under the government. The Liberals have ran a government with the purpose not of serving Canadians in general, but of allowing well-connected elite insiders to take advantage of programs that are supposed to be benefiting Canadians as a whole. We see this with ArriveCAN, an app that did not work very well, and that accidentally sent over 10,000 Canadians into quarantine. It is an example of these tiny middleman companies being able to make massive markups.
Now we are seeing the same thing in the abuse of indigenous contracting, where non-indigenous, elite insiders are able to take advantage of the program and take for themselves money that should be benefiting indigenous entrepreneurs and indigenous communities across the country. The contracting system in the government is broken. Well-connected insiders are taking advantage of it, and it is not producing value for money. Will this government apologize for the arrive scam scandal and commit to real meaningful change, or will it take a Conservative government to replace—
