The News Rundown
- The ArriveCan controversy continues to get worse and worse the more we learn about it. The horrendous app that caused headaches for travellers and cost taxpayers far more than it needed to, continues to haunt the Trudeau Liberals.
- Until now, the federal government has not been able to provide a clear breakdown of how much contract work the three companies that work on ArriveCan have been awarded. The new numbers were provided to MPs on the public accounts committee and they show that those three companies have received hundreds of contracts worth over $1B.
- Coradix Technology Consulting, Dalian Enterprises and GCStrategies have been at the centre of parliamentary scrutiny into the sharp increase in federal outsourcing on professional services – from about $8-billion a year in 2016 to projections of more than $21-billion last year.
- Two of the three companies – Dalian and GCStrategies – have just two employees each, while Coradix has said it has about 40 staff. The three companies are the subject of allegations of contracting misconduct that are being probed by the RCMP, and are currently suspended from further government contracts.
- The records show Coradix received 541 contracts worth a combined $596.8-million; Dalian received 445 contracts worth $127.8-million; and Dalian and Coradix in joint venture received 122 contracts worth $189.5-million. That works out to more than $914-million for Dalian and Coradix combined. GCStrategies received 105 contracts with a combined total value of $100.3-million. That brings the total value of contracts awarded to the three companies to just more than $1-billion.
- However, contract values do not mean the companies actually received all of those funds.The federal public accounts list payments sent to outside companies, meaning they provide a better sense of how much money the companies have actually received.
- The public accounts show that Dalian and Coradix have collectively been paid $635-million through federal contracts since 2003. GCStrategies, which was formed in 2015, has received $59-million since 2017, according to public accounts data up to March, 2023.
- Conservative MP and Treasury Board critic Stephanie Kusie said the scale of contract work awarded to the three companies underscores the need for a review of the way Ottawa spends billions of dollars each year on outsourcing.
- She said: “It’s astounding and it tells me that something is wrong with the system,” she said, adding that cabinet ministers are ultimately responsible for the spending that occurs in their departments, calling the spending a 'complete lack of oversight'.
- NDP MP Blake Desjarlais said his questioning of Dalian CEO David Yeo, a great-grandson of former chief of Alderville First Nation David Franklin, left Desjarlais with the view that Dalian, which describes itself as an aboriginally owned company, won contracts without proving that it met federal requirements to use at least one-third Indigenous workers, as it regularly partnered with Coradix, a non-Indigenous company to get work done.
- Desjarlais said the contract totals highlight concern that a “massive web of subcontractors is sucking out tons of money from the public service” and the system is not acting in the best interests of taxpayers.
- Yeo was also working as a public servant in the Department of National Defence at the same time that his company was contracting with the government, a massive conflict of interest that was not disclosed. Dalian was awarded a contract by the department on Sept. 19, 2023, the same day Yeo started leading an IT project team as an employee of the department.
- The stink is not just on the ArriveCan contractors though, it smells all the way into the federal government as well. Chulaka Ailapperuma, an acting director at the Canada Border Services Agency, admitted to an "error in judgement" when attending a dinner with the contractors at the centre of procurement misconduct investigations.
- Bloc MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné said of the CBSA misconduct findings that: “What is particularly shocking is… nothing is being done at CBSA. On the contrary, people that admit openly that they've breached the basic code of conduct as civil servants are now being promoted. That's scary."
- That's the crux of the matter. People in the federal government are getting rich on the public taxpayer dime, the public service has been easily bloated by the Trudeau Liberals, and the NDP under Jagmeet Singh are allowing the government to continue. We've already uncovered so many skeletons in the Liberal closet, how many more will appear once they're finally out of office?
- Supplementals:
- This week the Alberta government has tabled legislation that will see the much discussed changes for how healthcare is run in the province.
- The Bill will dismantle AHS or Alberta Health Services and replace it with four new agencies. The plan is part of Danielle Smith’s plan to decentralize healthcare with the goal of boosting efficiency and bringing healthcare back to the local level.
- The Health Minister would oversee all four agencies and each would then have a sector minister. Adriana LaGrange will control the acute care, primary care and continuing care agencies while Dan Williams will lead Recovery Alberta.
- The four agencies will cover acute care, primary care, continuing care, and mental health and addictions.
- The goal is to have Alberta Health Services focus on providing hospital care.
- The goal for primary care is to have that agency laser focused on enabling Albertans to find a family doctor.
- The work to create the mental health and addictions agency has already begun as well.
- Health Minister Adriana LaGrange was speaking to reporters and said, "We really need to make sure that Alberta Health Services in particular is focused on what it should be doing best, which is providing excellent acute care services, and we know that that has not always been the case.”
- That is the goal of restructuring right now but the future options are very interesting.
- Employees or classes of employees will be able to be moved by the minister from AHS into new organizations once they are established.
- Existing collective bargaining relationships will be maintained and the goal is to ensure there will be no job losses in the transition to these organizations.
- Amendments will also be made to the Regional Health Authorities Act, which will be renamed the Provincial Health Agencies Act and the Health Information Act, which have not been updated since the 1990s.
- The province says the amendments will be made to allow the transition to a sector-specific health-care system and place responsibility on agencies for operational planning and oversight of clinical service delivery.
- What is clear amongst all of this is that we are witnessing the dismantling of Alberta Health Services, an agency created in 2008 that oversaw everything from hospitals to food permitting.
- The NDP have accused the province of sowing chaos in Alberta healthcare and centralizing control with the government but as we’ve detailed time and time again the system is broken.
- Thus far out of any Canadian jurisdiction this is the most ambitious plan to shake the box on healthcare.
- With a starting point of decoupling broad oversight from AHS and moving AHS to just managing hospitals this creates interesting opportunities going forward.
- First there is a consistent drum beat among front line workers and union representatives that there are not enough frontline workers.
- This becomes more easily fixable under a detached model since frontline workers can more easily be hired for any of the four sub-agencies and can be specialized.
- Secondly leaning into that specialization there’s the opportunity to create specialized delivery methods for hospital care.
- Third and perhaps most interestingly with AHS running hospitals they can now run the facilities themselves or contract out to have them run to different agencies or even healthcare delivery corporations.
- These reforms bring us closer to a world that is very similar to the European model of healthcare delivery.
- In many European countries the government provides insurance or pays for services. Then after this the patient is free to go where they want and the hospitals and doctors are encouraged to provide better services to increase the number of patients they see.
- Right now this decentralized model is being done to trim the fat from AHS and the Ministry of Health but the opportunities here are what the media isn’t talking about.
- How do we know that this is a possibility?
- Danielle Smith has talked about it before re-entering the political arena.
- Health care reform in Alberta has just begun.
- Supplementals:
- Last weekend, the BC government announced that there were multiple attempts to breach government systems in coordinated cyberattacks over the past month that are said to have been ordered by a "foreign state actor", according to Public Safety Minister and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth.
- Farnworth said that investigations remain ongoing, and did not share which state could have been involved in the cyberattack or which systems they attempted to access, but that there was no evidence that sensitive information, such as health data, had been compromised in the attack, and that there had been no ransom demand.
- Shannon Salter, head of the public service added that the B.C. government first began investigating an attempted breach of its systems on April 10. On April 11, the cybersecurity incident was confirmed and reported to the CCCS, and the government also notified Microsoft's Detection and Response Team (DART) of the suspected breach attempt.
- A few weeks later, on April 29, Salter said the same threat actor was involved in additional activity on government systems, and public service workers were told to change their passwords. On May 6, another cyberattack was identified, with Salter saying the same threat actor was responsible for all three incidents.
- The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) and other federal agencies are also involved in the investigation, and the BC government said they waited to inform the public until after the CCCS told officials that safeguards had been put in place.
- Salter said the motivation behind the cyberattack remains unknown. She added that previous investments in B.C.'s cybersecurity infrastructure helped detect the attack last month, and the government spends more than $25 million a year to beef up its security controls, in addition to working closely with its federal partners.
- The government cyberattacks happened at the same time as other attacks on businesses like London Drugs. BC Premier David Eby said, to his knowledge, the cyberattack isn't connected to the other sets.
- The pharmacy and retail chain based in Richmond, B.C., had to close all of its stores in Western Canada for a week in response, with the chain's CEO remaining tight-lipped about the exact cause of the attack.
- The B.C. Libraries Co-operative said last week that it was also targeted by a hacker who threatened to release user data if a ransom was not paid.
- While there's a lot that we don't know, it's clear that information is a free commodity that businesses have been extracting from customers for years, and foreign governments and terrorist groups are very interested in getting their hands on that information.
- We’ll likely never know all the details about the recent cyberattack against the B.C. government. But it's clear that five months before the next provincial election, the potential for foreign interference has been shown once again to be a very real threat.
- B.C. spends $28 million annually on cybersecurity, and in 2022 dedicated $50.8 million to upgrade its capabilities. Government officials argue that helped mitigate the attacks by the unknown “threat actor” over the last month. But exactly how, even in general terms, they would not say for fear of tipping off the hackers as to our defensive capabilities.
- While the opposition and some columnists believe that the lack of information given to the public gives us little reason to trust in the safeguard of the sensitive personal information it holds on our behalf, it's fair to say that no one should feel safe about information that they give to companies and the government any more than they do to websites online.
- On a macro level, it's clear that there are foreign states very interested in Canadian personal information, and especially so in BC. Canada has been wrestling with the idea of foreign interference for awhile now, and while the federal government has been ineffective at combatting influence that has been seen to benefit the governing Trudeau Liberals, the same could be said for David Eby's NDP.
- BC United MLA Todd Stone introduced a private member’s bill last week that he said would ban foreign-funded individuals and organizations from disseminating false or misleading information during elections, as well as ban election contributions from, and collaboration with, foreign-related entities.
- Yet the NDP government let the bill die on the order paper without offering anything in return on this critical issue during the last week of the spring session, which ended this Friday for the summer.
- It's clear more than ever that BC has become a hotbed of foreign activity, from money laundering to real estate pumping, to foreign interference in federal elections, and now even state-sponsored cyberattacks. BC is on the frontline of a new type of war, and recent years have shown that we may have lost the fight before it even began.
- Supplementals:
Firing Line
- This week we learnt new information from Conservative MP Lianne Rood about what kind of “goods and services” are provided to foreigners who have claimed asylum in Canada but haven’t had their applications reviewed yet.
- The documents provided show that Ottawa gives about $224 per day to feed and house these foreigners who have claimed asylum illegally after entering the country.
- That is broken down at $140 per night per room as of January 2024 and $84 per day for meals per claimant.
- The document also says that the per diem may go even higher when factoring in other “essential items” like toiletries, medicines, and diapers.
- The letter signed by Paul Chiang, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion said, “Claimants in IRCC operated hotels, regardless of how they entered Canada, are provided with accommodations and meals once they are relocated.”
- Lianne Rood, Conservative MP for Lambton-Kent-Middlesex on X wrote “The NDP-Liberal government is giving TEN TIMES the benefits to illegal border jumpers than it is giving to help Canadian seniors! DISGRACEFUL!”
- Now one might think that Rood is sensationalizing but consider that the most recent figures from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada say that at the end of 2023 there were 42,387 pending refugee claims.
- In just the last three months of 2023, 2,145 people made an asylum claim in Canada after illegally entering the country — an average of one every hour.
- In that same three-month period, authorities would only process 4,139 cases out of a pre-existing queue of 44,000; 3,188 of which were accepted as official refugees, with the other 951 either rejected, withdrawn or abandoned.
- Factoring in about 40,000 refugee claimants we are spending $8.9m PER DAY to house those who came to Canada illegally and claimed asylum.
- This of course goes back to the very early days of Western Context where we discussed the perils of Roxham Road. Roxham road has closed up but we are still seeing a run of illegal migrants into Canada and they are costing Canadians.
- On top of that queue of 44,000 at the end of 2023 since 2017 39,643 have been approved as official refugees to 22,611 who have been rejected.
- We bring this story to you because it had been our hope that the ripples of Roxham Road would have faded but Canadians are still paying for these illegal migrants spurred on by a virtue signalling policy of Justin Trudeau shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. #WelcomeToCanada
- This is on top of course of the huge amount of students, new permanent residents, and temporary workers that Canada is housing.
- Our systems are at a breaking point and while we discussed students last week this week we are discussing illegal migrants or irregular migrants as the Trudeau administration wanted to call them.
- Presently one in four Canadians is born abroad - our current rate of bringing newcomers to Canada by official streams or illegal streams is the highest since confederation beating the previous record set in the 1920s.
- This is not sustainable on its own and when you factor in the millions spent per day or about $267m per month on illegal migrants one must ask if the Roxham Road situation is any better than it ever was.
- Supplementals:
Quote of the Week
“What is particularly shocking is… nothing is being done at CBSA. On the contrary, people that admit openly that they've breached the basic code of conduct as civil servants are now being promoted. That's scary." Bloc MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné on the CBSA misconduct with ArriveCan contractors
Word of the Week
Contract - a written or spoken agreement intended to be enforceable by law, especially concerning employment, sales, or tenancy.
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Show Data
Episode Title: Contract Controversy
Teaser: ArriveCan contractors receive over $1B in federal contracts, Alberta will decentralize AHS at the end of the year, and cyberattacks threaten the BC government’s storage of information. Also, illegal border crossers can be given up to $224 per day.
Recorded Date: May 18, 2024
Release Date: May 19, 2024
Duration: 50:25
Edit Notes: Lots
Podcast Summary Notes
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Duration: XX:XX