The government vendor who received tens of millions of dollars to build the controversial ArriveCan app has received $258 million in federal contracts since Justin Trudeau came to office.
The Conservatives are calling on the Auditor General to investigate every contract and every dollar paid to GC Strategies.
La Presse reported Wednesday that GC Strategies has won approximately 140 federal government contracts totalling $258 million since 2015. The Department of Public Services and Procurement announced that all these contracts will be subject to review.
Auditor General Karen Hogan released a report Monday revealing that ArriveCan’s cost was an estimated $59.5 million, with $19.1 million being paid to GC Strategies, the biggest price tag among all contractors.
The app was initially supposed to cost only $80,000.
Nearly half of these contracts were awarded to GC Strategies by the Canada Border Services Agency. Forty-six of the contracts were given to GC Strategies without a call for tender.
Following the news, Conservative MP Michael Barrett said that the two-person IT firm has done no actual IT work but has been paid $250 million in government contracts. With ArriveCan, GC Strategies received the contract but subcontracted the work out to others.
“It’s beyond reason that a two-person company operating out of a suburban basement could be doing $250 million in business with the federal government. And so today, that’s why we’re calling on the Auditor General to investigate every penny that has been paid to them,” said Barrett.
Conservative MP Garnett Genuis said Hogan’s report showed the cozy relationship between the Trudeau government and the contractors at GC Strategies. This company was involved in the development of the rules and requirements for making proposals.
“This seems, to me, akin to having the coach of one of the teams making the rules and directing the referee — an effective rigging of the process,” said Genuis.
Hogan said she was left perplexed by what she called the worst bookkeeping she had seen in years, when trying to evaluate what ArriveCan actually cost.
“This would be the first example I’ve seen where there is such a glaring disregard for some of the most basic and fundamental policies of rules and controls,” she said.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has called on the RCMP to expand its criminal investigation into ArriveCan. This call came only for the $60 million spent on ArriveCan.
Poilievre told La Presse Tuesday that his party would be taking steps to have two parliamentary committees look into this affair, the Public Accounts Committee and the Government Operations and Estimates Committee.
“A company with two employees, which is at the heart of the ArriveCan scandal, and which has an address in the basement of a house in the suburbs of Ottawa, received about a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts. It doesn’t make sense. There’s something askew. There are secrets. We need the truth. The scandal is bigger than ever,” said Poilievre.
According to La Presse, the company has four, not two, employees.
True North reached out to both partners at GC Strategies but received no comment by the time of publication.
Public Services and Procurement Canada has suspended all contracts with GC Strategies at the Canada Border Service Agency’s request. The department has undertaken a review of the contracts awarded to this company.
“A thorough review of all contracts awarded to this supplier is underway to assess the overall risk associated with them, and PSPC will take appropriate action once the assessments are complete,” said Michèle LaRose, a spokeswoman for the department.
