Madam Speaker, J.F.K. purportedly said once that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. From this, we can gather that the decision to hire GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app was a failure because nobody will admit to being the one responsible. Nobody wants to claim the parentage of this terrible decision.

Conservatives have been persistently prosecuting this case of the arrive scam scandal. The government spent $54 million. It contracted GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app. The RCMP is now investigating some of the contractors involved. We have repeatedly asked a simple question: Who is the person responsible for the decision to hire GC Strategies? This is a two-person company. Nobody in the company does any IT work. All they do is receive the contract and then subcontract it. They go on LinkedIn and send messages to people asking them to do the work. They do not do any of the work themselves. They just receive the contract and subcontract it.

It is like if you, Madam Speaker, hired me for $100 to paint your fence, and then I went and hired another member to paint the fence for $50. They did the work. You paid me and I collected a whole bunch of money in the middle. That is essentially how GC Strategies operated in this case and in other cases. It does not have the people or capacity to do the actual work.

By all indications, it was a terrible decision to spend enormous amounts of public money through GC Strategies for this overpriced, glitchy, ineffective app. We have all kinds of things that have come out during the discussion of this issue. We have doctored resumés that have, in another case, been presented to the Government of Canada. We have systemic questions about how the procurement process works. We also have senior public servants accusing each other of lying about who made the decision. This is quite incredible. We have senior public servants Cameron MacDonald and Minh Doan accusing each other of lying about who made the decision to go with GC Strategies.

Again, we have repeatedly, in this House and in committee, asked who was responsible for this decision. I put the question to the Minister of Procurement yesterday, but he did not answer. Under the Liberal-NDP government, over the last eight years, we have seen how everything is broken, but nobody is responsible. Apparently anything that goes wrong is nobody's responsibility. Again, as J.F.K. said, victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

There are a lot of orphans according to the Liberals. They said they did not make the decision and it was external factors. This was a decision of someone in government. Somebody decided this two-man company working out of a basement doing no IT work were the right people to build this app. They were the right people to spend $54 million on.

We will continue to ask the government this simple question: Who made the decision? Was it a minister? Was it the Minister of Public Safety or the Minister of Procurement? Was it a particular senior official? We have senior officials actually accusing each other of lying. They are saying, “It was not me. It was that guy.” The government is ultimately responsible for the decisions made while it is in power. It has been in power for eight years.

It is a simple question. I hope the parliamentary secretary will answer. Who made the decision to choose GC Strategies to build the ArriveCAN app?

Garnett Genuis

$591,290.00