(Ottawa) MPs lost patience Monday with the omissions of Kristian Firth, one of two partners at GC Strategies, during his testimony in parliamentary committee last month. They unanimously adopted a motion Monday evening to force him to testify again, this time at the bar of the House of Commons. This extremely rare procedure was last used in 1913.
A man named RC Miller was summoned by the House after refusing to answer questions from the public accounts committee. He appeared there twice, but did not provide the requested information. He was then declared in contempt and imprisoned until the end of parliamentary proceedings approximately four months later.
Kristian Firth’s testimony is scheduled to take place on the afternoon of April 17, after question period. He will first be reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Commons, then will have to provide answers to questions that remained unanswered last month and respond to new questions from MPs. His lawyer did not respond to The Press Monday.
Conservative MP Luc Berthold said during the debate on this privilege motion that it was necessary to “send a clear signal to the witness that we are not messing with the House of Commons. » The original motion was presented by his Ontario colleague Michael Barrett and adopted in committee, but the parties ended up agreeing on a modified version.
Mr. Firth’s testimony before the government operations committee left MPs wanting more last month. He notably refused to name the officials with whom he had developed the criteria for one of the contracts for the development of the application ArriveCAN which his company subsequently obtained without a call for tenders, under the pretext of the investigation opened by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The contractor had disputed the Auditor General’s figures and admitted that GC Strategies had pocketed only 2.5 million with the contract forArriveCAN.
The firm, which has only two employees, had obtained 19.1 million of the 60 million contracts for ArriveCAN, or the largest share, according to the Auditor General’s estimates. His report released in February had the effect of a bomb on Parliament Hill and subsequently led to the opening of numerous other investigations into this financial scandal. There are 14 in total, including that of the RCMP, the Border Services Agency which was responsible for these contracts and the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner.
GC Strategies has since lost its federal government security clearance. It thus finds itself completely excluded from the procurement process. The role of the firm was to recruit information technology personnel for the development ofArriveCAN, for a commission of 15% to 30%. The app, which was mandatory at the border during the COVID-19 pandemic, was subject to significant cost overruns.