A history related publication that I read called ‘What If’ focuses on events that could have occurred in the past that would have changed the direction of the world or a country. Two that come to mind include ‘What if the U.S. had invaded Canada and we became the 46th state?’ And ‘What if communism hadn’t failed? Many more interesting topics have been speculated and written about over the years. One that is notably missing is ‘What if the Canadian government had less scandals?’
In real life it seems we go from secret foreign election interference incidents to a loss of green slush money to insiders, or we learn that consulting firms are telling Ottawa what to do with such frequency they appear to be operating as a shadow government. This at a reported cost of upwards of $15M per contract, $3M to write a 150-page plus report, and $25M on ‘how to implement’ the report. One of the most expensive scandals fell under the Arrive Canada App. However, nothing was more cost notable than the infamous CERB payments without little or no internal governance.
While it has been three-plus years since the end of COVID restrictions and program fall-out, there remains cost-related scandals regularly being uncovered, such as non-repayable CERB payments awarded to all prisoners and other misdirected payments.
A more recent and more disturbing discovery has recently been made by the audit team around CERB business loans. In 2020, Christina Freeland’s department wasted billions when they rolled out the Canada Emergency Business Account loans offering $60,000 interest-free loans with one-third forgiven if repayment is made by 2026. She assigned the project to Export Canada who in turn outsourced it to Accenture Consulting in Brazil. Their services cost $209M with no oversight, and paid out $3.5B in loans to ineligible applicants. Yes, that is billions! No checks or balances were in place at either end. In addition, Accenture billings were also paid with no questions asked, regardless of their staff charging for 14 hours of work daily while the centre was only open for nine hours a day. The pay rates varied from $60 per hour to more than $750 per hour. The call centre was budgeted at $2.5M, but cost Canada $23.2M. All the work was conducted in Brazil by Brazilians with no oversight or explanations offered. When will it end?
I find it particularly upsetting that not only is Canada’s per-person GDP growing at the slowest rate since the Great Depression, but the Ottawa-Gatineau federal employees are reporting the highest incomes nationwide for the most part along with uncontrolled misspending. All the while taxpayers are restricted by a harms bill to avoid any conversation about accountability. Not only is Canada one of the only high-income countries not economically recovered from the COVID recession, the Fraser Institute reports that our troubles began well before COVID-19.
While I am angry for all Canadian taxpayers, as an Albertan I am especially angry for such wastage given our province has contributed disproportionately to the tune of $244.6B from 2007 to 2022 alone. At the same time, we have government climate activists as ministers levying growing Carbon taxes and emission caps at our key industries.
