(Ottawa) The contracts of all companies founded by GC Strategies associates will be examined by elected officials. The company has been in the news since being singled out last week in an Auditor General’s report on the financial fiasco surrounding the app ArriveCAN. The Conservatives want to force its two founders to testify for the third time in parliamentary committee.
Before founding GC Strategies in 2015, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony had another company called Coredal Systems Consulting which also obtained contracts from some federal departments. Most of these contracts were awarded by Transport Canada, according to information available in open government data.
A motion submitted Tuesday morning by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid for the House of Commons standing committee on public accounts to expand its study ended up being unanimously adopted Tuesday after Conservative MPs accused her of trying to divert the subject.
“We need to get to the bottom of this,” she argued. She added that elected officials need to “understand what this organization is and why it has been able to operate for so many years under different names and different contracts. »
The Montreal Journal reported last week that Coredal Systems Consulting had been awarded nine contracts worth a total of $3.6 million from Transport Canada between 2010 and 2015, most of them for information technology consulting services. The Conservatives then formed the government under Stephen Harper.
The Press arrived at the same result after a compilation of the contracts available on the federal government’s open data site.
We asked the Department of Public Services and Procurement (PSPC), Transport Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Department of Natural Resources for the number and total amount of contracts awarded to Coredal Systems Consulting. They were unable to provide this information at the time of writing.
Only the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) responded that it had not awarded any contract to Coredal Systems Consulting.
Public data on contracts over $10,000 awarded by the government was called into question last week after The Press reported that GC Strategies’ federal contracts totaled $258 million since the Liberals were elected to government in 2015. There is confusion within the government apparatus since neither SPAC, nor Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, nor the documents submitted in Parliament that are supposed to allow the public to see how their money is spent do not provide a clear picture.
The ministry maintains that the total value of contracts awarded to GC Strategies is lower, citing the sum of 59.8 million for 34 contracts. This amount is far from exhaustive since several departments with discretionary powers have awarded contracts to GC Strategies without using the services of PSPC.
The amount instead reaches $96 million between November 2015 and November 2023, according to a written response to a request for information submitted to the House of Commons by Conservative MP Michael Barrett. The compilation was carried out by all federal departments and agencies and duly signed by the responsible ministers.
In light of this new information, the Conservatives want to send a subpoena to testify to MM. Firth and Anthony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates examining cost overruns surrounding enforcement ArriveCAN. They have already answered questions from parliamentarians twice, but declined a third summons to testify in December citing mental health problems.
Like the subpoena power available to the courts, parliamentary committees hold significant powers. They can in particular force witnesses to appear, recalled the House leader of the Conservative Party, MP Andrew Scheer. “If GC Strategies defies this parliamentary order, the Sergeant at Arms will be instructed to arrest the owners of GC Strategies and bring them before the Committee. This drastic measure is rarely used, but it is necessary given the abuse of taxpayers’ money,” he added.
Mr. Scheer presented a motion to this effect at the committee meeting Tuesday afternoon. An amended version of the motion providing in particular that steps be taken to have witnesses appear after a period of 21 days had the support of the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois. But Liberal MPs stretched their speaking time until the scheduled end of the meeting without the motion being put to a vote.
This is a rarely used power. The last subpoena dates back to 2007 when businessman Karlheinz Schreiber was summoned in the Airbus affair while he was serving a prison sentence. He had arrived handcuffed.
Another parliamentary committee, that of public accounts, is already looking into all the contracts awarded by ministries, agencies and state companies not only to GC Strategies, but also to Dalian and Coradix. These two firms sometimes operate in joint ventures to obtain federal government contracts.
Dalian received the second largest sum for the development of the application ArriveCAN, or 7.9 million, after GC Strategies which obtained 19.1 million. As with GC Strategies, it is a two-employee company that obtains contracts and then subcontracts the work to other companies. GC Strategies is one of its subcontractors, but it also subcontracts the work to information technology specialists.
This is what happened under a contract with the CBSA before the pandemic. The Montreal firm Botler AI, which was approached by GC Strategies to develop a chatbot on workplace harassment, alleges that the payments it was to receive from GC Strategies passed through the hands of Dalian and Coradix before being paid to it. . A situation that she denounced.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have confirmed that they have opened an investigation following Botler AI’s allegations. She is also interested in the Auditor General’s report on ArriveCAN as part of this investigation. The CBSA, which is also conducting its own internal investigation, transferred information to the RCMP. Two employees have since been suspended.
ArriveCAN : more than 2000 people want to join a class action
A law firm has launched a class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of people who had to undergo unnecessary mandatory quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic due to problems with the app ArriveCAN. According to the Privacy Commissioner, around 10,200 people received erroneous notifications to quarantine. “One, this is not an isolated incident and, two, there was an error or omission to ensure the application worked properly,” attorney Jeff Orenstien said in an interview. “We consider that there was negligence on the part of the Attorney General of Canada. » The action was filed in Federal Court on Monday and since then more than 2,000 people have indicated that they want to join it. It must be authorized by the court.