The ArriveCan hearings, which are looking into the $54-million cost of app, have had many strange twists since they began in November, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
In the long, strange series of hearings into the ArriveCan app, one of the most peculiar twists is that Conservative MPs have switched sides from prosecution to defence.
In November, when senior civil servant Cameron MacDonald appeared at hearings, Conservative MPs pounced. Now they are his defenders – and attacking investigators for treating him unfairly.
Mr. MacDonald had been a director-general of IT innovation at the Canada Border Services Agency when the ArriveCan project started in 2020.
When he first appeared before the committee looking into the $54-million cost of ArriveCan on Nov. 7, MPs were itching to find out who had chosen a two-person firm, GCStrategies, for $11.2-million in contracts. That firm did none of the work but hired subcontractors and charged a 15- to 30-per-cent commission.
There were other questions: The two principals of a small Montreal firm named Botler had come forward to allege questionable practices in another deal in which GCStrategies and Mr. MacDonald were involved.
At the November hearing, Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie opened the questioning with a series of allegations that suggested Mr. MacDonald was close to GCStrategies and its co-owner, Kristian Firth.
Another Conservative MP, Larry Brock, a former prosecutor, warned Mr. MacDonald and his former CBSA colleague, Antonio Utano, that they had to tell the truth, and admonished them for being “quick to impugn the whistle-blowers,” who he referred to as “the brave two entrepreneurs from Botler AI.”
That kind of huff-and-puff questioning is part of the parliamentary tradition of playing for the cameras and especially popular with Conservative MPs right now. Video of tough questions can be posted on social media even if they don’t elicit useful answers.
On Tuesday, Mr. Brock was playing prosecutor again. Yet this time he was after an investigator looking into ArriveCan contracting, and suggesting Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano were being unfairly targeted.
That’s quite a U-turn.
Certainly, there have been contradictory allegations. In November, Mr. MacDonald pointed the finger at his former boss, Minh Doan, as the person who chose GCStrategies.
The Liberals ignored conflict warning, and now green-tech agency is in limbo
Later, both Mr. MacDonald, now an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada, and Mr. Utano, now at the Canada Revenue Agency, were suspended from their jobs without pay, after a preliminary CBSA review found concerns. Their lawyer said the suspensions were retaliation for their testimony.
On Monday, the government investigator leading the internal investigation, Michel Lafleur, told the committee his team determined quickly in 2022 that there was enough evidence to warrant a formal investigation, but it went slowly because they didn’t want to hamper an RCMP criminal investigation.
The Conservatives were keen to go after the investigator. They suggested it was inappropriate for Mr. Lafleur to share preliminary findings with his superiors. Mr. Brock called Mr. Lafleur’s investigation “seriously flawed,” and told Mr. Lafleur he was wrong to call his report a “preliminary statement of facts” because the allegations weren’t yet proven. Mr. Lafleur noted, essentially, that his preliminary report was preliminary.
As the questioning went on, it emerged that Mr. Brock had obtained a copy of the preliminary report – which has not been made public – from either Mr. MacDonald or Mr. Utano, or someone acting on their behalf.
Mr. Brock’s questioning had a clear theme: that Mr. Lafleur’s preliminary report was unfairly negative and perhaps Mr. Lafleur had withheld information from the RCMP to make Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano look bad. He also suggested the investigators had gone easy on the person that Mr. MacDonald had blamed – Mr. Doan, now the federal government’s chief technology officer.
The Globe and Mail reported in January that a CBSA IT employee had alleged that Mr. Doan took unusual steps that led to the destruction of e-mails – which Mr. Doan denied.
At the hearing, Mr. Lafleur testified that a review is continuing but he has not seen any evidence of e-mails being deliberately deleted. Still, Mr. Brock asked Mr. Lafleur when the Auditor-General was “notified of four years of deleted relevant e-mails.” When Mr. Lafleur replied that he had found no evidence of deleted e-mails, Mr. Brock complained he wasn’t answering the question, and asked it again. And again.
There’s been no clear indication at the committee of precisely why the Conservatives have had a conversion – playing tough cop with Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano in November but suggesting they are victims in February. Tory MPs have enjoyed playing the heavy, shooting off explosive questions. Now they have fired in both directions.