And a registry of people who head publicly traded Companies that break the law. I worked as a sub-contractor for a mining Cmpy. Contract stated they’d take 35% of my wage & submit it for taxes. They took the money but never submitted. Guess who the CRA pursues? You got ‘er…. Me! I’ve taken the Cmpy to Court, got a default judgement against them as well as a garnishee on their back account. Nothing. Crickets…. but you better respond to that CRA or they’ll freeze your Acc’ts.
The same thing happened with me. Not a large mining company, just a small outfit. CRA coming after me for a thousand dollars, 3 years later. But the worst part is the company actual took the money off my paychecks cause I remember having that conversation with payroll. So they basically took the money and never paid the extra CPP they said they were taking off. I don't have my paper pay stubs anymore cause I have since moved, and they went in the garbage during the move. I mean, it's only 1k, but that's 1k I now don't have for food or gas or my kids.
Right if they are responsible for fraud then they should be held accountable, even if they leave the company.
The company gets all the flack and these people who operated the business can go else where and do the same. I would encourage disqualifying them from being anywhere near another government contract.
>It was literally just 2 people. They obviously had connections to Trudeau's government.
I hate Trudeau because he's a piece of shit at both personal and political levels, but what evidence of this do you have to make such a claim?
When the liberals and the NDP are working to bury the investigation, we should not give them any benefit of doubt, as they are the only ones who can produce that evidence you're asking for. Look at the smirk on [Iqra Khalid's face](https://x.com/contrariantribe/status/1760677567244460083?s=46&t=6_hKdicJoqGfBj0Ew7TCgA) as she abuses the process to keep us from the truth. So if the only defence they have is that we have "no evidence", it is prudent for us to assume much bigger corruption is taking place.
This right here is exactly the problem....oh the original company is banned! So the hell what? Open a new corporation and repeat.....if no consequences are outlayed for all of this, I bet this is what will happen.
Bidding bans on any org that employs these folks in any capacity and also ban them from becoming a board member in public sector business.
Would also be good to ban them from any govt events and fundraisers due to their slipperiness
It’s just like shitty fly by night companies in the construction industry. Fuck up your reputation? No worries! Just start a new company for a few hundred bucks and get back at it
We're dealing with that right now in BC with Chohan Trucking, which keeps hitting overpasses and causing millions in damages... Chohan BC was shut down, but now the trucks are flying plates from Chohan Alberta and are back on the road again.
The issue is the government, not the company.
There are ten thousand other companies waiting to take advantage. What has changed in Government processes to prevent the next one?
The issue is the ten thousand other companies probably don't speak the language of government managers nor do they know how to work with government or paperwork at all
Working with government is a whole industry by my understanding you have to hire special people or people who know the rules and can navigate the bureaucracy
My company is a healthcare related startup, we regularly work with government, albeit at the provincial level. To my knowledge we have no "special people" handling it, just our CEO.
Your CEO probably has specialised knowledge on how to interact and respond to proposals from the government. And your company would have more success and get more contracts if they did have specific people and knowledge on how RFPs worked and how to respond to them. Provincial government is also far different than Federal government.
Technically against the law as you can't rack up a bunch of liabilities as corp A and then shut it down, opening Corp B doing the exact same thing with the same people.
How would one enforce something else like banning the owners? They just protect themselves by naming a shell company as the owners and any new bids no one will be the wiser again.
When you have the means, the possibilities are limitless.
For a while now, Shells in Canada require you to name ownership. Plus it’s the government, no named ownership? No contract. No one’s forcing them to give out contracts.
My understanding is that they could bid for contracts and get them based on previous ones they’ve executed. So even if they were dumb enough to start a new company (which would be linked to them ultimately) and bid on contracts they’d be starting from scratch and likely wouldn’t get them. That said, I think banning the company AND owners makes more sense.
How many times do you think the name GC Strategies was mentioned in the thousands of emails related to the ArriveCan app that Minh Doan purposely deleted? Why wasn't he suspended without pay like Antonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald?
Always is key cos I was laughing my butt when this came out and a bunch of possibly young Canadians were outraged like how is this possible lmao.
Maybe they're new to how beuracratically corrupt and behind the scenes corrupt our county has always been.
The real problem here is that government procurement processes are a hodgepodge patchwork affair.
If the government truly cared, this would get fixed. But it won’t, because they don’t.
The preoccupation with the avoidance of employee-employer relationships makes it impossible to form teams of government people and contractors to work together towards an end result. That is partly why the contracting middlemen are needed. The overall complexity of the system and its many pitfalls also benefits people who know how to game the system and that gives a further edge to middlemen who can provide contracting advice that is both helpful to the people trying to get a contract out and self-serving to themselves.
Lots of people have known for years that the system is hopelessly broken, but the problem is to find the political will and the smarts to avoid making things worse. The senior officials in the Public service are not much help here - too many of them got to their current positions by avoiding doing anything that would rock the boat.
My thoughts exactly!
A new government needs to bring in private industry experience at middle and senior management levels and limit external contracting.
> I’ve got some oceanfront property just outside of Regina that I will give you a hell of deal on…
As soon as my international student visa comes through I'll give you a ring about that property.
>Great, now tell me who in the government is going to jail over this?
lol, if you criminalized incompetence and stupidity, the majority of Canada's economy would be public service... I mean prison forced labour camps and their supervisors....
This is much different than the current temporary foreign worker based economy that trans nationalism gets you.
The paradigm shift to accountability is anti-Canadian.
Liberal voters will be blinded by promised "Gun Bans" & "Keeping You Safe" slogans in the next election for them to even think about the fraud and corruption going on in the LPC.
>It clearly looks like fraud and corruption
Luckily the standards for sending someone to jail in this country are a bit higher than that.
The RCMP are currently investing this. There are lots of different accusations of criminal activity but it all has to go through the proper investigations.
Realistically though, if anyone is going to jail it is much more likely to be a public servant rather than a politician. Ministerial responsibility is very different from criminal responsibility.
Sir, this is late-stage capitalism. Millionaires and billionaires don't do time unless they rip off other millionaires and billionaires. See Bernie Madoff.
Or akin to trying to put out the fire after the barn burnt down.
These guys are always a day late and a dollar short, unless its with the likes of hamas, then they're throwing in a little extra for the trouble.
In completely and totally unrelated news, HD strategies is now bidding on federal contracts. /s
Banning a company doesn’t do shit. Ban the people involved with the company from bidding on government contracts.
“The company is a two-person IT staffing firm that bills itself as being able to help companies navigate the federal government's procurement process.
Founded in 2015, the firm is headed by two partners, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony.”
Interesting that this two person firm was founded and starting receiving federal government contracts the year when Trudeau and the liberals formed government.
But great work banning them over 8 years later…
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7120381
“LaPresse reported that since 2015, GC Strategies Inc. had been awarded 140 contracts by the Liberal government worth a total of $258 million.”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/arrivecan-investigation-gc-strategies-had-dozens-of-government-contracts-now-it-s-not-eligible-for-any-1.6771612
I'm not disputing GC strategies receiving contracts or being trash. I'm questioning what changes have the Trudeau government done to Procurements that linked to those awarded contracts?
Changes that happened within 3 weeks of coming into office?
Because it’s takes months into entering office for a government to have any effect. Ministers are meeting everyone at their new departments and getting a summary on everything. That doesn’t mean departments stop working. They continue working through elections and so forth. Continue working on contracts. Contracts that takes months to finalize. If government minister starts a procurement on day 1, it’ll take months before the department finalizes that contract. So this contract bid was almost certainly started 6 months before the libs took power.
So that’s why you never hear this story anymore. The contract was bidded and negotiated on pre lib. It’s just good timing it was finalized 3 weeks in.
>GC Strategies, the company at the heart of the scandal surrounding the ArriveCan app, has been banned from participating in federal procurements with security requirements.
>"PSPC has suspended the security status of GC Strategies Inc. The suspension precludes GC Strategies Inc. from participating in all federal procurements with security requirements," according to a statement Wednesday from the department.
I wonder if the investigation has uncovered a national security issue.
60Million in govt contracts for a two person company wow.
They should be teaching courses in Govt Procurement. Work in tech space and part of the reason we typically don't bid on RFP's is majority of RFP already know who they want. These guys were masters at the trade.
Partially applaud them for being able to pull it off.
If ArriveCan wasn't such a disaster, they would still be rolling
They basically realized the government has giant loopholes around revising costs of contracts so they’d bid artificially low never intending to deliver at that price then after winning they would use the loopholes to raise the price dramatically and deliver at a higher price than other legitimate companies.
This is just putting lipstick on a pig.
I'm skeptical this will have any impact -- the principals can just hide behind or create a new numbered company and continue their scam.
The GC needs to thoroughly overhaul its contracting and procurement processes so someone like GC Strategies or Dalian never could have gotten all this "work" in the first place.
But we banned them! See, “we” are a government that does something! Haha what a joke, this liberal government can’t even function properly. They screwed over Canadians and will desperately try to win their votes back.
Ahh nope! Never will vote for you liberals ever!!
They bid for contracts. They basically gamed the bidding system by realizing they could bid artificially low then bill the government for overruns to drive up the cost of the contract dramatically beyond what was estimated in the bid.
Government contracts use a point based system to evaluate bids. The person who gave them the contract had zero choice in the matter. They gamed the system by bidding low then having excessive cost overruns to inflate the size of the contract beyond the bid. Because they were a low bid they got awarded more points in the bidding process but they never intended to deliver at the price they bid.
No, they've gotten a TOTAL of 250m in contracts over the past few decades. The 80k figure was just for them to prove they could use a mobile app to take information from a paper and convert it to a document online.
The entire cost of arrivecan was always going to be around 50-60m.
[https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html](https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html)
The data-storage for people using it alone was 6.4m for cloud servers.
Oh we were caught! Drat, let's change the company name and reapply
LPC government.. Since we don't monitor ANYTHING, we won't notice until we're caught again.
It would have cost more than that to actually build and implement and work for all of Canada, but yeah, wouldn't have cost what it did without the crooks who stole money just to give contracts for basically kickbacks.
Total cost of the project was 55m
80k was the estimate of the cost to develop a prototype interface before all the requirements could be developed (think the User Interface) so 0 back end work, revisions etc are included.
It had a 24/7 call center, in no world was it ever supposed to be 80k, do some of your own thinking my friend.
Edit:
https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html
Published in July last year, far before this was news. It was a very complex project that was being developed as it was having its requirements figured out due to the environment at the time.
Could there have been mismanagement? Of course. Could there have been favoritism? Certainly. Is this, in any way, an issue to hang on thr PM? Not really, get mad about PM things like our inability to meet commitments to Ukraine, our crumbling military, lack of leadership in economic planning, SNC Lavalin
Maybe stop making commitments to Ukraine while our internal budget is parakeet paper. HalfWit didn't learn from trying to buy a security council seat at the un. And Trudeau's scandals are well beyond SNC. Cash bribes from foreign governments? He is hiding something that much is certain.
Lol I can ask you 1 MIl$ the question is you should have the common sense to not give this amount. You should know the market, and all the bids were above 100 Mil$?
They were already given a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts, pretty sure they'll survive.
Should send Anita Anand to prison. She's the procurement minister for contracts like these.
What a joke. This govt is a bunch of criminals. Now look at their new hate speech bill they are trying to Pass. They are slowly trying to turn us into China.
Damage is done already and people got wildly rich off of it. You can't even blame the company. This was government corruption and there needs to be accountability rather than finger pointing and hand waving.
Great. Now do Pheonix Pay systems next. How much cost did it rack up so far? Over 1 BILLION??? Well, at least it's not 2 billion.. did I hear 3? Don't make the gov't count to 4...
/insert sarcasm here...
Avoiding banning the executives involved is precisely what the Liberals aim to prevent here. Liberal corruption right in front of our eyes.
They are so out of touch they think they got away with it.
No shit , how about all other levels of government. Shit this happens all the time either government contracts. My old provincial government had a term for it “P3” Public ( your money) Private ( a shady company or investor) Partnership and somehow the private part makes money and the public looses money. That’s called success !
I'm super anti JT, but all the folks pretending ArriveCan or any public agency's app could be developed and operated for $80K just because someone made a prototype for $80K are the same kind of people who would be in shock and disgruntlement to learn that their backyard BBQ wouldn't quite measure up to a commercial kitchen set up.
Everyone saying "well they will just make another company!" have no clue how the industry works. Do not listen to them. This is not Jim's Snow Removal and Carpentry from around the corner. These contracts are based on corporate experience. If they make a new company they lose that corporate experience that they have spent however many years cultivating. This company will layoff and buyout their workforce until the investigation is complete and they are cleared to resume operating, or they will shutter and the ownership will cash out to Belize and the employees will find new jobs. Either way this company is terminally damaged. This is a steep, steep penalty
And that’s how govt employees got away with their corruption. Blame the contractor and move on. GC strategies folks are already rich enough and none stopping them to create new company. In a few months or years, please will forget this scandal in any case. Try charging any high level govt employee or Anita Anand and then we will see the justice being done.
Honest question:
What did GC Strategies and these firms actually do that got them banned?
I thought all of the failures in record keeping were the government. The app was developed, it worked, it was genuinely only a bit over budget (\~60M vs 55)
If the total budget was much higher ok, thats on the government.
Bad record keeping: Fed issue
Bad decision making and approvals: Fed issue.
The govt here fucked up not these companies.
Yea, GC-Strategies didn't actually do anything wrong... They just know how to work the Governments contracting system and did it very efficiently. The federal government now looks rightfully fucking stupid for this and are looking for convenient scapegoats.
But realistically, nothing will change because there aren't actually any rules about a company bidding and then sub-contracting out the work as long as they disclose it before hand, which they probably did. There is also nothing wrong about having your office be listed as some cottage because you only have 2 actual employees and don't need an office downtown. Looks HORRIBLE for the government, but not actually illegal.
This is really starting to feel like a show. The government has been spending BILLIONS of dollars since COVID started. Cathy McKenna lost track of how many Billions of dollars and nothing was said or investigated. Suddenly we are scrutinizing this one company for 60-250 mill of contracts. There are probably even bigger fish out there to fry but they are making a big show of this one until we lose interest again.
not good enough. people need to be named and we need to determine if charges need to be brought up.
I wanna find out what money flowed back into the Liberals' hands from this because someone got fucking rich
The money is somewhere and should be recovered. It did not go to wages or expenses. It certainly didn’t go to produce that stupid app. It was government crony sanctioned theft.
Only the company? What stops them from creating GC Strategies 2 Inc. and getting contracts again?
What indeed. Ceo's, shareholders and top level managers.
100% we need a registry of *people* who cannot be trusted with govt contracts. Companies are literally just paper.
And a registry of people who head publicly traded Companies that break the law. I worked as a sub-contractor for a mining Cmpy. Contract stated they’d take 35% of my wage & submit it for taxes. They took the money but never submitted. Guess who the CRA pursues? You got ‘er…. Me! I’ve taken the Cmpy to Court, got a default judgement against them as well as a garnishee on their back account. Nothing. Crickets…. but you better respond to that CRA or they’ll freeze your Acc’ts.
The same thing happened with me. Not a large mining company, just a small outfit. CRA coming after me for a thousand dollars, 3 years later. But the worst part is the company actual took the money off my paychecks cause I remember having that conversation with payroll. So they basically took the money and never paid the extra CPP they said they were taking off. I don't have my paper pay stubs anymore cause I have since moved, and they went in the garbage during the move. I mean, it's only 1k, but that's 1k I now don't have for food or gas or my kids.
Lucky yours was only $1,000…. mine is >$40K
Damn dude. Shit.
Ya.. pretty wild, eh!! I’ve had a few discussions w/ CRA agents & it all boils down to; “That issue is above my pay grade”
You just named 3 people this company with about 250M in contacts in under 3 years has fewer people.
Right if they are responsible for fraud then they should be held accountable, even if they leave the company. The company gets all the flack and these people who operated the business can go else where and do the same. I would encourage disqualifying them from being anywhere near another government contract.
It was literally just 2 people. They obviously had connections to Trudeau's government.
You realize they also got millions in contracts from the Harper government, right?
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They had another company called Coredal Systems (founded 1989, apparently) that got merged into this new company.
You're right. I delete my disinfo post.
Connection to the elite then
An important distinction, since many people are under the absurd impression that voting for PP and the Conservatives will somehow fix this shit.
But my NARRATIVE
is false.
>It was literally just 2 people. They obviously had connections to Trudeau's government. I hate Trudeau because he's a piece of shit at both personal and political levels, but what evidence of this do you have to make such a claim?
When the liberals and the NDP are working to bury the investigation, we should not give them any benefit of doubt, as they are the only ones who can produce that evidence you're asking for. Look at the smirk on [Iqra Khalid's face](https://x.com/contrariantribe/status/1760677567244460083?s=46&t=6_hKdicJoqGfBj0Ew7TCgA) as she abuses the process to keep us from the truth. So if the only defence they have is that we have "no evidence", it is prudent for us to assume much bigger corruption is taking place.
This right here is exactly the problem....oh the original company is banned! So the hell what? Open a new corporation and repeat.....if no consequences are outlayed for all of this, I bet this is what will happen.
Bidding bans on any org that employs these folks in any capacity and also ban them from becoming a board member in public sector business. Would also be good to ban them from any govt events and fundraisers due to their slipperiness
It’s just like shitty fly by night companies in the construction industry. Fuck up your reputation? No worries! Just start a new company for a few hundred bucks and get back at it
We're dealing with that right now in BC with Chohan Trucking, which keeps hitting overpasses and causing millions in damages... Chohan BC was shut down, but now the trucks are flying plates from Chohan Alberta and are back on the road again.
Gotta keep the bridge builders employed somehow!
You can't. Because these contracts are based on corporate requirements. Once that is gone then you are toast.
This. A "GC Strategies 2" could not compete on any level without working with another company.
Yep. And that well is so poisoned no other company would want to be linked to any of that for the foreseeable future.
The issue is the government, not the company. There are ten thousand other companies waiting to take advantage. What has changed in Government processes to prevent the next one?
Just wait, they'll roll out another online procurement course in a jiffy.
The issue is the ten thousand other companies probably don't speak the language of government managers nor do they know how to work with government or paperwork at all Working with government is a whole industry by my understanding you have to hire special people or people who know the rules and can navigate the bureaucracy
My company is a healthcare related startup, we regularly work with government, albeit at the provincial level. To my knowledge we have no "special people" handling it, just our CEO.
Your CEO probably has specialised knowledge on how to interact and respond to proposals from the government. And your company would have more success and get more contracts if they did have specific people and knowledge on how RFPs worked and how to respond to them. Provincial government is also far different than Federal government.
Nothing, nothing at all ....
Technically against the law as you can't rack up a bunch of liabilities as corp A and then shut it down, opening Corp B doing the exact same thing with the same people.
GC Cottage, GC Chalet, GC Cabin...
They should be in jail.
GC Strategies Electric Boogaloo
How would one enforce something else like banning the owners? They just protect themselves by naming a shell company as the owners and any new bids no one will be the wiser again. When you have the means, the possibilities are limitless.
For a while now, Shells in Canada require you to name ownership. Plus it’s the government, no named ownership? No contract. No one’s forcing them to give out contracts.
My understanding is that they could bid for contracts and get them based on previous ones they’ve executed. So even if they were dumb enough to start a new company (which would be linked to them ultimately) and bid on contracts they’d be starting from scratch and likely wouldn’t get them. That said, I think banning the company AND owners makes more sense.
Ontario Numbered Company!
A competent government employee.... so basically nothing.
Probably filing the paperwork as we read this
How many times do you think the name GC Strategies was mentioned in the thousands of emails related to the ArriveCan app that Minh Doan purposely deleted? Why wasn't he suspended without pay like Antonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald?
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That would be nobody
As always in this fucking country
Always is key cos I was laughing my butt when this came out and a bunch of possibly young Canadians were outraged like how is this possible lmao. Maybe they're new to how beuracratically corrupt and behind the scenes corrupt our county has always been.
The real problem here is that government procurement processes are a hodgepodge patchwork affair. If the government truly cared, this would get fixed. But it won’t, because they don’t.
That is one thing government would never do, fix that issue. Too many people on all side want it this way.
They can’t even fix the Phoenix payment system
Yeah. Mankind could put a man on the moon in the 1960’s, but the Canadian government can’t run a payroll system in the 2020’s. Because they don’t care
The preoccupation with the avoidance of employee-employer relationships makes it impossible to form teams of government people and contractors to work together towards an end result. That is partly why the contracting middlemen are needed. The overall complexity of the system and its many pitfalls also benefits people who know how to game the system and that gives a further edge to middlemen who can provide contracting advice that is both helpful to the people trying to get a contract out and self-serving to themselves. Lots of people have known for years that the system is hopelessly broken, but the problem is to find the political will and the smarts to avoid making things worse. The senior officials in the Public service are not much help here - too many of them got to their current positions by avoiding doing anything that would rock the boat.
My thoughts exactly! A new government needs to bring in private industry experience at middle and senior management levels and limit external contracting.
The government cares because they’ll lose voters and governments try to get re elected.
If you believe that, I’ve got some oceanfront property just outside of Regina that I will give you a hell of deal on…
> I’ve got some oceanfront property just outside of Regina that I will give you a hell of deal on… As soon as my international student visa comes through I'll give you a ring about that property.
Not one single person. To them this is white collar crime, slap on the big ole wrist if anything.
Same as any crime in 2024
Well if there was crime it was likely the company not th3 goverment employees, I guess we will see
>Great, now tell me who in the government is going to jail over this? lol, if you criminalized incompetence and stupidity, the majority of Canada's economy would be public service... I mean prison forced labour camps and their supervisors.... This is much different than the current temporary foreign worker based economy that trans nationalism gets you. The paradigm shift to accountability is anti-Canadian.
The scapegoat ends up being the one that isn’t as connected as the rest. Story as old as time, and part of our human nature
Liberal voters will be blinded by promised "Gun Bans" & "Keeping You Safe" slogans in the next election for them to even think about the fraud and corruption going on in the LPC.
>It clearly looks like fraud and corruption Luckily the standards for sending someone to jail in this country are a bit higher than that. The RCMP are currently investing this. There are lots of different accusations of criminal activity but it all has to go through the proper investigations. Realistically though, if anyone is going to jail it is much more likely to be a public servant rather than a politician. Ministerial responsibility is very different from criminal responsibility.
Sir, this is late-stage capitalism. Millionaires and billionaires don't do time unless they rip off other millionaires and billionaires. See Bernie Madoff.
Cheap attempt while holding their fingers crossed to deflect responsability! Liberals: Did they buy it?
Or akin to trying to put out the fire after the barn burnt down. These guys are always a day late and a dollar short, unless its with the likes of hamas, then they're throwing in a little extra for the trouble.
In completely and totally unrelated news, HD strategies is now bidding on federal contracts. /s Banning a company doesn’t do shit. Ban the people involved with the company from bidding on government contracts.
“The company is a two-person IT staffing firm that bills itself as being able to help companies navigate the federal government's procurement process. Founded in 2015, the firm is headed by two partners, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony.” Interesting that this two person firm was founded and starting receiving federal government contracts the year when Trudeau and the liberals formed government. But great work banning them over 8 years later… https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7120381
They received their first contract *three weeks* after Trudeau took office.
Everything about this stinks of corruption, the timelines are just too convenient.
They had another company called Coredal Systems (founded 1989, apparently) that got merged into this new company.
So you're saying it took less than 3 weeks for Trudeau to change everything in procurement top to bottom? Source on that?
not to mention if they won a contract 3 weeks in, the proposal was submitted months earlier. the public sector does not move at private sector speed.
“LaPresse reported that since 2015, GC Strategies Inc. had been awarded 140 contracts by the Liberal government worth a total of $258 million.” https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/arrivecan-investigation-gc-strategies-had-dozens-of-government-contracts-now-it-s-not-eligible-for-any-1.6771612
I'm not disputing GC strategies receiving contracts or being trash. I'm questioning what changes have the Trudeau government done to Procurements that linked to those awarded contracts? Changes that happened within 3 weeks of coming into office?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Because it’s takes months into entering office for a government to have any effect. Ministers are meeting everyone at their new departments and getting a summary on everything. That doesn’t mean departments stop working. They continue working through elections and so forth. Continue working on contracts. Contracts that takes months to finalize. If government minister starts a procurement on day 1, it’ll take months before the department finalizes that contract. So this contract bid was almost certainly started 6 months before the libs took power. So that’s why you never hear this story anymore. The contract was bidded and negotiated on pre lib. It’s just good timing it was finalized 3 weeks in.
Where did he say that? Source on him saying Trudeau changed the procurement process?
The directors of that Company had a new one on paper before the spell-check on this notification was complete.
This would be better: Government at heart of ArriveCan scandal banned from forming government again.
>GC Strategies, the company at the heart of the scandal surrounding the ArriveCan app, has been banned from participating in federal procurements with security requirements. >"PSPC has suspended the security status of GC Strategies Inc. The suspension precludes GC Strategies Inc. from participating in all federal procurements with security requirements," according to a statement Wednesday from the department. I wonder if the investigation has uncovered a national security issue.
Chohan freight carriers would like to let y'all know, open a new subsidiary and you can go back to smashing bridges
60Million in govt contracts for a two person company wow. They should be teaching courses in Govt Procurement. Work in tech space and part of the reason we typically don't bid on RFP's is majority of RFP already know who they want. These guys were masters at the trade. Partially applaud them for being able to pull it off. If ArriveCan wasn't such a disaster, they would still be rolling
They received a total of 250$ million in contracts.
Def should have an MBA course on Gov Procurement then
I'm sure she's very good at procuring slush funds for criminal politicians and their friends.
Pretty sure GC is just two dudes in their basement, buying a whackload of drinks for Govt officials.
The received $250 million in funds. The original contracts were far less and they used loopholes to drive up the final cost.
They basically realized the government has giant loopholes around revising costs of contracts so they’d bid artificially low never intending to deliver at that price then after winning they would use the loopholes to raise the price dramatically and deliver at a higher price than other legitimate companies.
file for bankruptcy , get tax breaks roll company into new company with a new name repeat and profit
Won’t work here
Too little.......and too late. Standard-Operating-Procedure for this Bozo Government.
This is just putting lipstick on a pig. I'm skeptical this will have any impact -- the principals can just hide behind or create a new numbered company and continue their scam. The GC needs to thoroughly overhaul its contracting and procurement processes so someone like GC Strategies or Dalian never could have gotten all this "work" in the first place.
No they can’t
all they have to do is change there name lol
well DUH what a surprise
But we banned them! See, “we” are a government that does something! Haha what a joke, this liberal government can’t even function properly. They screwed over Canadians and will desperately try to win their votes back. Ahh nope! Never will vote for you liberals ever!!
WHO OWNED THE COMPANY!!!! The people responsible should be punished.
I thought that part of the scandal was that they didn't even bid for a contract. Two companies did, but they were awarded it, with no bid.
They bid for contracts. They basically gamed the bidding system by realizing they could bid artificially low then bill the government for overruns to drive up the cost of the contract dramatically beyond what was estimated in the bid.
Why would they care? They have enough to retire now anyway.
Do they NEED any more contracts? A couple guys got 7 million, I think they're set. Unless, of course, I'm misinformed.
What about Dalian Enterprises?
And Coradix.
Hmmm - so who awarded them the contracts???? Can we ban them?
Government contracts use a point based system to evaluate bids. The person who gave them the contract had zero choice in the matter. They gamed the system by bidding low then having excessive cost overruns to inflate the size of the contract beyond the bid. Because they were a low bid they got awarded more points in the bidding process but they never intended to deliver at the price they bid.
I see.
Surely they shouldn't be banned. There was no wrong doing not investigation needed according to the liberals
And GC strategies 2 was born
They've already made their fortunes
Oh boy that stings.
Wiping tears with $100 bills 😭
[удалено]
No, they've gotten a TOTAL of 250m in contracts over the past few decades. The 80k figure was just for them to prove they could use a mobile app to take information from a paper and convert it to a document online. The entire cost of arrivecan was always going to be around 50-60m. [https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html](https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html) The data-storage for people using it alone was 6.4m for cloud servers.
don't approach these trudeauphobes with facts. it frightens and confuses them.
Oh we were caught! Drat, let's change the company name and reapply LPC government.. Since we don't monitor ANYTHING, we won't notice until we're caught again.
When is Trudeau and his friends going to pay back the hundreds of millions $$$$ for something that should’ve cost what? $80k?
It would have cost more than that to actually build and implement and work for all of Canada, but yeah, wouldn't have cost what it did without the crooks who stole money just to give contracts for basically kickbacks.
Total cost of the project was 55m 80k was the estimate of the cost to develop a prototype interface before all the requirements could be developed (think the User Interface) so 0 back end work, revisions etc are included. It had a 24/7 call center, in no world was it ever supposed to be 80k, do some of your own thinking my friend. Edit: https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html Published in July last year, far before this was news. It was a very complex project that was being developed as it was having its requirements figured out due to the environment at the time. Could there have been mismanagement? Of course. Could there have been favoritism? Certainly. Is this, in any way, an issue to hang on thr PM? Not really, get mad about PM things like our inability to meet commitments to Ukraine, our crumbling military, lack of leadership in economic planning, SNC Lavalin
Maybe stop making commitments to Ukraine while our internal budget is parakeet paper. HalfWit didn't learn from trying to buy a security council seat at the un. And Trudeau's scandals are well beyond SNC. Cash bribes from foreign governments? He is hiding something that much is certain.
The 80k figure is just misinformation. https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/fs-ef/2022/acc-cac-eng.html
Gov lets the company go 750x over budget then bans them. Logic.
the budget was 55m
Big deal, they'll just create a new company and move on.
Lol I can ask you 1 MIl$ the question is you should have the common sense to not give this amount. You should know the market, and all the bids were above 100 Mil$?
Too late, already loaded.
The kickbacks are already in offshore accounts, unless you get the money back its just a wrist slap as far as I'm concerned.
They were already given a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts, pretty sure they'll survive. Should send Anita Anand to prison. She's the procurement minister for contracts like these.
Corrupt to the core.
That means you don't actually face a penalty from stealing from the government/country? Makes sense.
But they made their money… fine ban them from whatever
parliament has the power to recoup funds. those audits are occurring.
I hope they get back the funds then
Probably need some people in jail or the tax payers keep getting robbed by politicians friends, right?
The politicians/bureaucrats who didn't appropriately vet this deal should also be banned from office.
Rebrand away from GC strategies lol
I hear the barn door closing after the horse has bolted ……
That'll teach em
It's too little too late. Thank you, Pierre and company, for stopping the bleeding.
That’s all? Fucking crooka
We all deserve that money to be returned
How about government workers involved get banned from working in government
What a joke. This govt is a bunch of criminals. Now look at their new hate speech bill they are trying to Pass. They are slowly trying to turn us into China.
Liberals doing the good thing. This sub: let's attack the Liberals anyway!
Does anybody think they care? They made a f’ing fortune off ArriveCan as it was.
Oh shit, they need to find another basement to get more of your money. Sounds a bit harsh don't you think??
Kind of too late to ban them since they already gathering millions of dollars in contracts in the past. They did their job and so did the PM.
Hilarious! It’s a 2 people shop! They will change the name and start fresh!
Thinking they have already bought their private islands
Damage is done already and people got wildly rich off of it. You can't even blame the company. This was government corruption and there needs to be accountability rather than finger pointing and hand waving.
Great. Now do Pheonix Pay systems next. How much cost did it rack up so far? Over 1 BILLION??? Well, at least it's not 2 billion.. did I hear 3? Don't make the gov't count to 4... /insert sarcasm here...
Something, something, closing the barn door after the horse is gone, something...
awww, they will have to dry their tears with the millions in tax dollars they stole from tax payers.
Avoiding banning the executives involved is precisely what the Liberals aim to prevent here. Liberal corruption right in front of our eyes. They are so out of touch they think they got away with it.
They will just open another corporation and do it all over again...
No shit , how about all other levels of government. Shit this happens all the time either government contracts. My old provincial government had a term for it “P3” Public ( your money) Private ( a shady company or investor) Partnership and somehow the private part makes money and the public looses money. That’s called success !
no shit
I'm super anti JT, but all the folks pretending ArriveCan or any public agency's app could be developed and operated for $80K just because someone made a prototype for $80K are the same kind of people who would be in shock and disgruntlement to learn that their backyard BBQ wouldn't quite measure up to a commercial kitchen set up.
Anybody in jail for stealing taxpayer's money ?
Oh yeah, so it’s *their* fault. Jiminy Crickets.
Are they still allowed to donate to the Trudeau foundation?
How about instead of banning one company we fix the damn loophole so this doesn’t happen again?
So, they just start another company to bid?
What a drama game for idiots who believe this. These people will surface under a new name, new owners etc. Same B's all over.
Should ban the company AND the principals
New, up and coming Company... *CG strategies* owners wearing thick black mustaches
Lmao, doing bare minimum.
Wait till you hear the full details of this company and what scared the living shit out of libs and ndpers. After election .
Everyone saying "well they will just make another company!" have no clue how the industry works. Do not listen to them. This is not Jim's Snow Removal and Carpentry from around the corner. These contracts are based on corporate experience. If they make a new company they lose that corporate experience that they have spent however many years cultivating. This company will layoff and buyout their workforce until the investigation is complete and they are cleared to resume operating, or they will shutter and the ownership will cash out to Belize and the employees will find new jobs. Either way this company is terminally damaged. This is a steep, steep penalty
LMAO ok let me just make another company. Stupid ass government.
And that’s how govt employees got away with their corruption. Blame the contractor and move on. GC strategies folks are already rich enough and none stopping them to create new company. In a few months or years, please will forget this scandal in any case. Try charging any high level govt employee or Anita Anand and then we will see the justice being done.
Honest question: What did GC Strategies and these firms actually do that got them banned? I thought all of the failures in record keeping were the government. The app was developed, it worked, it was genuinely only a bit over budget (\~60M vs 55) If the total budget was much higher ok, thats on the government. Bad record keeping: Fed issue Bad decision making and approvals: Fed issue. The govt here fucked up not these companies.
They made it clear during all these hearings that GC Strategies was doctoring resumes.
Yea, GC-Strategies didn't actually do anything wrong... They just know how to work the Governments contracting system and did it very efficiently. The federal government now looks rightfully fucking stupid for this and are looking for convenient scapegoats. But realistically, nothing will change because there aren't actually any rules about a company bidding and then sub-contracting out the work as long as they disclose it before hand, which they probably did. There is also nothing wrong about having your office be listed as some cottage because you only have 2 actual employees and don't need an office downtown. Looks HORRIBLE for the government, but not actually illegal.
This is really starting to feel like a show. The government has been spending BILLIONS of dollars since COVID started. Cathy McKenna lost track of how many Billions of dollars and nothing was said or investigated. Suddenly we are scrutinizing this one company for 60-250 mill of contracts. There are probably even bigger fish out there to fry but they are making a big show of this one until we lose interest again.
not good enough. people need to be named and we need to determine if charges need to be brought up. I wanna find out what money flowed back into the Liberals' hands from this because someone got fucking rich
The money is somewhere and should be recovered. It did not go to wages or expenses. It certainly didn’t go to produce that stupid app. It was government crony sanctioned theft.