The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 17, 2025


Carney loses another vote! Liberals resist recovering money


Episode Stats

Length

19 minutes

Words per Minute

187.89578

Word Count

3,709

Sentence Count

197

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

On the opening day of the G7, a motion was put forward by Conservative MP Michael Barrett asking for the government to try and recover some of the $64 million that GC Strategies Incorporated received from the government for developing the Arrive Can app that was never actually used.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I find it funny that this happened on the opening day of the G7
00:00:07.240 with other world leaders in town in Kananaskis meeting with Mark Carney, but Mark Carney and
00:00:13.180 his Liberal government failed another vote in the House of Commons. The Conservatives put forward
00:00:19.160 a motion and the NDP and the Bloc Québécois joined with them to pass it over something that
00:00:25.280 the Liberals should have already been dealing with themselves. This isn't some frivolous motion
00:00:30.260 being put forward that's saying that the Liberals suck, don't we all agree? It's saying the Liberals
00:00:35.380 should probably try and recover some of the taxpayer money that GC Strategies effectively stole
00:00:41.560 to put together that ridiculous Arrive Can app. I'm going to get into the details in just a second
00:00:47.360 here, but first I just want to remind you guys, hey, if you like the channel, make sure to drop a
00:00:52.100 like on this video. If you are not yet a subscriber, scroll down and hit the subscribe button so you'll
00:00:57.480 see more of our videos in the future and also leave a comment on what you think about the topic of the
00:01:03.580 day. But now let's get into it. This was a motion put forward by Conservative MP Michael Barrett basically
00:01:12.000 asking for the government to try and recover some of the money that GC Strategies was given to put
00:01:17.580 together this Arrive Can app that was never actually used. Ryan Gerritsen here posting about
00:01:23.840 what happened says this is big news. The motion passed. Canadians are getting their money back for
00:01:28.300 the Arrive Can scandal. Liberals lost the vote 172 to 165. Now, I disagree with this line that says
00:01:35.900 Canadians are getting their money back for the Arrive Can scandal because in theory, the Liberals could
00:01:41.040 just ignore this. They could just pretend that like, well, there's nothing that's specifically
00:01:47.000 saying that we have to do it. They're just demanding that we do it. And I know a lot of people can
00:01:52.040 sometimes get cynical about stuff like this where there's nothing saying they have to do it. So who
00:01:57.220 cares? They're just going to ignore it. Yeah, they probably are just going to ignore it. At the same
00:02:01.560 time, this does hurt the credibility and popularity of Mark Carney and the Liberal government. This is basic,
00:02:10.300 basic stuff the Liberal government should be doing. This is just like the previous motion that the
00:02:16.840 Liberals lost on when the Conservatives demanded that they actually table their budget before the
00:02:22.000 end of spring session. And the Liberals, who at the time weren't even planning on tabling anything
00:02:26.260 until 2025, after that vote passed, they still said, we're not going to do it now. We're going to wait
00:02:31.700 until the fall. And everyone who's watching this story develop is thinking, aren't you the people who
00:02:37.380 claim that you had the plan to fight back against Donald Trump, the United States? And by the way,
00:02:42.600 we will be getting to Mark Carney being a complete weakling at the G7 tomorrow, not even exactly doing
00:02:48.260 anything wrong. But compared to his campaign rhetoric, he's a complete weakling. He's playing
00:02:53.340 nice with Donald Trump, which is not at all how he portrayed himself during the election. But
00:02:57.400 I digress. That previous motion was, again, something the Liberals should have been taken care of.
00:03:03.060 Have a budget right away. You're claiming that you can get a budget right away. Why do you have to
00:03:07.360 wait till 2026? Or now, why do you have to wait till the fall? You were Mark Carney, the man with the
00:03:13.020 plan. Where's the plan? And now this new one, I thought the Liberals are supposed to be different
00:03:18.340 now under Mark Carney than they were with Justin Trudeau. But turns out they are still covering up for
00:03:24.820 their own corruption. And this is not GC Strategies corruption. This is their corruption, because
00:03:30.560 no way people in the government didn't understand what GC Strategies was all about and how much this
00:03:36.500 app should have cost. I remember they even tested other companies, how quickly they could put a
00:03:41.400 product like this out. And they could do it for a fraction of the budget in a fraction of the time.
00:03:46.860 So check out the motion text here. I thought it was quite good. It says that given that the Auditor
00:03:53.620 General found that arrive can contractor GC Strategies Incorporated was paid 64 million from
00:04:00.120 the Liberal government. And in many cases, there was no proof that any work was completed. The House
00:04:04.720 calls on the government to a get taxpayers their money back within 100 days of the adoptions motion
00:04:10.240 and be imposed a lifetime contracting ban on GC Strategies Incorporated. Any of its subsidiaries,
00:04:16.360 its founders, Christina Firth and Darren Anthony and any other entities with those individuals as
00:04:21.500 affiliated. And by the way, this fee is very important because the Liberals, upon this scandal
00:04:29.500 kind of breaking out and them trying to deal with it, have only said that they are putting a seven
00:04:35.380 year ban on GC Strategies, not the founders. The founders can do whatever they want still.
00:04:41.060 They can go join another company taking government contracts. They just can't contract under the name
00:04:45.820 GC Strategies, which why would they want to at this point? That name is complete rat filth.
00:04:51.180 Why would they want to associate themselves with the scandalous company if they were still trying to
00:04:56.220 get government contracts? And by the way, these people are probably filthy rich at this point from
00:05:00.540 having sealed Canadian taxpayer money. So no, no way they're going to try and do any more work at this
00:05:06.380 point for the government anyways. But there was about $20 million, what I read elsewhere. $20 million
00:05:14.780 was attached to contracts given to GC Strategies associated with the RiveCAN that never actually
00:05:20.460 had any proof of work. So they're requesting money to get certain things done associated with this app and
00:05:26.540 other administration of it. And they're given money for each element of it and certain elements that they
00:05:32.460 were given money for, nothing actually was done. So in theory, at least $20 million should be
00:05:39.900 left over. In other cases, you can't really recover the money because GC Strategies took the money and
00:05:46.620 paid somebody else to do work. They did legitimate work technically, they paid their employees, they kept
00:05:52.860 some portion of profit, obviously. So the government can't exactly go to those subcontractors and demand they
00:05:58.620 get the money back. But there is money where GC Strategies never paid anybody. So in theory,
00:06:03.740 that money should be sitting in some sort of bank account or many bank accounts. And if taxpayers got
00:06:09.100 it back, they could actually get a lot of services for it. I looked this up just a bit ago, what is the
00:06:15.820 average RCMP officer paid in salary per year? And it was around $71,000, probably once you've been in the
00:06:22.220 force a decade, it's probably a little bit more than that, or maybe, you know, getting closer to six figures.
00:06:27.180 But if they had $20 million that they haven't spent on anything, how many RCMP officers could
00:06:33.420 you hire for that? Oh, 281 RCMP officers, that sounds like it's a good deal better than $20 million
00:06:40.780 for literally nothing. And my theory as to why the Liberals don't want to look into this is because
00:06:46.860 maybe if they started recovering some of the money, maybe it would be in Liberal Party associated
00:06:52.700 individuals bank accounts, maybe it's an MPs bank account, a minister, a staff member, because
00:06:57.900 when you're giving up bloated contracts like this to friends of yours at places like GC Strategies,
00:07:04.300 you're not doing it for nothing, at least in theory, unless you're just a nice guy and you want to
00:07:09.340 engage in corruption to just benefit your friend for no other reason than that. It probably is that
00:07:14.460 you're expecting at least some of the money to kick back to you in other ways. And I wonder that $20
00:07:20.140 million, which has no work associated with it, has already scattered out to a lot of different people
00:07:25.420 that they cannot justify how they got the money without being involved in this corruption.
00:07:31.260 But anyways, I just want to move on now to Michael Barrett speaking because he was giving a real bit
00:07:37.980 of a report out on this bill, his motion that he put forward after it passed. And I think he does a
00:07:45.260 really good job of kind of laying out how pathetic what the Liberals were doing before this was, where
00:07:51.020 they only want to give the seven year ban and they have seemingly no interest in actually recovering
00:07:56.700 the money, despite that Mark Carney pretending that he was going to be totally different replacing Justin
00:08:01.580 Trudeau. Here is a case where it's tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in a time when Canadians are
00:08:09.580 struggling to get by. And we have the Liberals with Prime Minister Carney saying it's a new government,
00:08:15.580 he's a new Prime Minister, it's going to be new days and new ways. So we said, you know what,
00:08:20.860 let's give them a chance to do the right thing. So this motion was giving the government 100 days
00:08:26.940 to get taxpayers their money back and to not have a seven year ban for just the company name that was
00:08:36.140 involved in this case where, where all of the procurement rules were thrown to the side,
00:08:41.980 where Canadians were taken for a ride, it costs 10s of millions of dollars, it's a $64 million app,
00:08:48.380 it did nothing to keep people safe. And, and get us our money back get us the get us the 10s of millions
00:08:57.340 back and a lifetime ban for the company, but also for its for its principles for for its founders.
00:09:05.660 You'll remember we had Christian Firth come to the bar of the House of Commons, and his partner,
00:09:11.980 Darren Anthony, with them both come to committee. And we didn't get a lot of answers. But the Auditor
00:09:16.940 General did get answers for us. So this motion just came before the House. And conservatives,
00:09:23.020 of course, we voted for our motion. And then the Bloc Québécois voted for the motion. And guess what?
00:09:30.780 So did the NDP, who've been supporting the Liberals for the last 10 years.
00:09:39.740 But Mark Carney's so called new Liberal government. They voted against getting taxpayers their money back.
00:09:47.340 And yeah, this, that's kind of the big story here. Again, is this going to change everything about
00:09:54.220 government? Is there going to be a new election? Again, I don't think any of the parties want a new
00:09:58.060 election. But no, this is obviously, though, chipping away at the false credibility of Mark
00:10:03.020 Carney when it comes to anti corruption. Again, he's pretending he's going to do things differently
00:10:06.940 than Justin Trudeau. And yet he is still covering up for corruption, which makes you wonder if he
00:10:13.100 could potentially be involved, considering that he was the economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. And
00:10:19.100 in theory, you'd assume that he'd maybe be in meetings where they're talking about hiring
00:10:23.340 GC strategies and monitoring the ongoing creation of the Arrive Canada. He probably knows about it.
00:10:29.260 I'm not saying that he took money in any way. But this is still kind of on his record, too,
00:10:33.740 because this is what the talk of the office would have been back when he was working with Justin
00:10:38.220 Trudeau. But now I just want to jump over to another clip that I found quite startling. And that was
00:10:46.540 who is this again? It is the Auditor General basically saying that the Liberals haven't been
00:10:52.860 effectively following the rules on any of the contracts they've been handing out. And again,
00:10:56.860 this is also why they don't want to dig too much into the GC strategy scandal,
00:11:01.260 because it kind of touches on the way that the Liberals operate normally.
00:11:06.300 Given the investigations you've done so far on McKinsey and GC strategies, do you have a sense
00:11:10.860 at this point of how widespread these issues are in the public service?
00:11:15.180 Well, I can only speak to those two elements. And in both cases, the vendors represented a really
00:11:20.780 small percentage of what was spent on professional services contracts by the federal government. But in
00:11:27.260 the McKinsey work, we had looked at 10 crown corporations and 10 departments. In this audit,
00:11:33.340 there's 31 federal organizations, including one crown in departments. And we found issues in almost
00:11:41.180 every contract that we looked at, which tells me that there's no reason to believe it's limited to
00:11:46.780 these two. And it's time for the public service to go back to the basics and understanding procurement
00:11:52.140 rules and why they should be followed.
00:11:53.660 And this is kind of the issue. We have Mark Carney taking over. And as the guy who's pretending to be
00:11:58.700 the steady hand on Canada, driving us forward in a more professional way, he doesn't want to go back
00:12:04.140 and make sure we're dotting our I's or crossing our T's for future cases, making sure we know what
00:12:08.780 the problems are. So then when we sign, when we make new contracts with companies, they're not full of
00:12:13.820 a bunch of holes that the company can drive trucks through, pocketing money for work that they're not
00:12:18.620 doing, getting bloated contracts that don't actually line up at all with the kind of work
00:12:23.660 they're going to do. Again, GC Strategies was basically embarrassed when the government had another
00:12:29.740 company given a fraction of the money with a fraction of the time, got an app that was actually
00:12:34.540 functional out with again, less time, less money. And it was actually functional because Arrive Can never
00:12:40.540 worked. And it was a useless app in the first place just meant to basically prevent people or make it more
00:12:45.500 difficult to travel if you're unvaccinated. It was all ridiculous. But now I want to end this video
00:12:50.460 off. Again, reminder, like the video, subscribe to all that great stuff. I want to end the video off
00:12:55.340 on something kind of silly. Not really silly. It actually is kind of disturbing that stuff like
00:12:59.900 this ever gets printed, not in terms of like, oh, I'm shaking in my boots, but like disturbing in terms
00:13:05.660 of like the mental well being of certain Canadians out there. By the way, it was obviously Father's Day
00:13:11.660 yesterday. I actually made a video about young men, which also included the topic being brought up of
00:13:17.980 how people grew up and their fathers. I'm going to link that video I made yesterday of why young
00:13:22.700 men are voting conservative in the description below and pinned the top of the comments if you
00:13:26.540 haven't seen it yet. I did a response video to the socialist YouTuber Steve Boots. Hopefully you like
00:13:32.460 it. I saw today he was refusing to respond to me, which probably means that he can't respond to it
00:13:37.820 because my points were generally pretty solid. But yeah, check that out if you haven't seen it.
00:13:41.980 I thought it was pretty good. But I also saw this yesterday and it's absolutely ridiculous,
00:13:47.420 but I think my friend Brittany does a very good job of describing how insane this is. She is responding
00:13:53.740 to this Toronto Star headline that says, opinion on Father's Day, it's critical to recognize the
00:13:59.900 importance of mothers. Now, I dare you to find a publication who has ever printed the reverse of that,
00:14:06.140 that it's Mother's Day, let's talk about men. Brittany here says, on Mother's Day, we celebrate moms.
00:14:11.980 On International Women's Day, we celebrate women. On Father's Day, according to the Toronto Star,
00:14:16.700 we still celebrate females. Imagine being so anti-male, you hijack Father's Day to talk about women.
00:14:23.660 And it's not just Brittany who's highlighting this problem. Brittany is obviously a conservative and
00:14:29.020 more of a social conservative, so obviously she's going to highlight this as a problem. But I found it
00:14:33.820 interesting to see that the kind of socialistic journalist, not that he's a full-on socialist,
00:14:39.900 but I've seen him say things like basically endorsing wealth taxes because screw wealthy people.
00:14:45.660 Max Fawcett here actually saw this as a big issue on the left, which I'm actually happy that the left
00:14:51.820 is starting to recognize that maybe they shouldn't do insane garbage like this. Although I'm not sure how
00:14:58.860 genuine they are if they just don't want this being said publicly and they just want this to be more
00:15:03.580 hidden or whether or not they actually genuinely think this is toxic for Canadian politics. But Max
00:15:09.660 Fawcett here says, if you're trying to elect 343 conservatives, MPs to the House of Commons and make
00:15:16.380 Doug Ford Premier for life, this is a good way to do it. And I absolutely agree. If you're trying to
00:15:23.100 keep get more conservatives into office, the left is going to continue being insane like this in Canada.
00:15:29.020 The left, the liberals only won the 2025 election because of two things. The conservatives in a lot
00:15:35.900 of ways let them win. I found the campaign that Jenny Byrne ran from HQ was way too safe, didn't
00:15:41.980 take any risks, didn't talk to a lot of voters, actual interests. Basically, we're just hoping the
00:15:46.620 liberals would lose rather than conservatives actually trying to win. So that was one thing going for the
00:15:51.260 liberals. And then also the news cycle was basically on their side the entire time, not just the media
00:15:56.460 is on their side, that's baked into the cake. And frankly, I don't think that many people really
00:16:01.020 vote based on what the media says. But genuinely, the media cycle with news about tariffs and Trump
00:16:06.620 made a bunch of people anxious. So they default voted for the safety blanket liberal option because
00:16:11.820 the liberals were very anti-Trump. And it's seen as like the reverse of the Republicans. The United States
00:16:18.060 is the liberals in Canada. And oh, we can't vote conservative. They're like the Republicans.
00:16:22.860 That didn't doom the conservatives to losing. I think, again, they played it too safe. If they
00:16:27.100 took chances, they could have won. They even came very close. Conservatives winning a minority
00:16:32.060 government was only 8000 votes away in all the tightest ridings. So if they got like 0.3% of the vote
00:16:38.860 more, they probably would have gained those 8000 votes in those specific ridings. But again, I thought that
00:16:45.260 they just ran a very meh campaign. But stuff like this is a great thing to start highlighting.
00:16:51.420 How patently insane many people on the mainstream left are. And this is mainstream left. This is the
00:16:57.420 Toronto Star, a very liberal paper. And they are saying things like this. Maybe they're just doing
00:17:04.140 it for the clicks. But again, you don't print something that you don't believe in even for the
00:17:08.300 clicks. You may print something eccentric that you believe for clicks. But this is genuinely something
00:17:13.820 that represents the editorial board of the Toronto Star. And the conservatives should start slamming
00:17:18.140 them for it and showing this in the faces of more normie friends. Like, make sure that your more normie
00:17:24.060 friends who don't follow politics and don't care, make sure they're aware of this. This is what actual
00:17:28.380 people on the left think that are urging you to vote liberal. Anyways, so that should be it for me
00:17:35.340 today, guys. Again, make sure to like the video, subscribe the channel, leave a comment, do all that
00:17:39.580 great stuff. And I will be back tomorrow, likely covering the G7. And then in another video,
00:17:45.180 not sure if it's going to be tomorrow, I want to talk about the leadership review of Pierre Polyev,
00:17:50.060 because it was just announced today that that will be taking place in January of 2026.
00:17:56.220 I generally like Pierre Polyev. I'm totally fine with him staying on as leader. But I'm not going to be
00:18:01.100 the person who's going to say like right now pumping my fist saying, yeah, yeah, keep Pierre Polyev.
00:18:06.060 He should be leader for another 20 years. I'll probably vote yes on him, obviously. But I just
00:18:11.420 don't want to say yes now, because it's still a long time away. And I think it's always healthy
00:18:15.820 to tell leaders, keep proving yourself, keep proving that you can be the leader. I think one way that
00:18:21.020 Pierre Polyev can keep proving himself that he's a competent leader is I think that in the postmortem
00:18:26.300 that the party I hear is actually doing previously, it sounded like they weren't going to do it.
00:18:30.300 In the postmortem, they need to clean house at HQ. There are too many people who have lost too many
00:18:35.340 elections and refuse to change how they do things who are currently in HQ. And if they stick around,
00:18:41.020 I think that yeah, the Liberals could screw up big time in this government. But if you run a
00:18:45.980 banned campaign, you can lose there. It's an old adage, but it's true. Campaigns matter. If you don't
00:18:51.980 campaign hard, if you don't campaign to win, you are going to lose. And when I say that, I mean that if
00:18:57.420 you're not actively going out there taking risks, making statements that get people's attention, making
00:19:03.100 people want to vote for you, you're not going to capture people's votes. And in 2025, too often,
00:19:08.220 HQ people like Jenny Byrne played it safe. They're not campaign managers, they're risk managers. They
00:19:13.740 basically said default things that nobody could possibly disagree with. They take some risks here
00:19:18.460 and there, but not nearly enough. It was very placid, which meant that unless the Liberals freaked people
00:19:24.540 out, they weren't going to run into the arms of the Conservatives. You got to make people want to run to
00:19:28.060 you rather than just simply hoping that the other guys scared them away and then were the safe place
00:19:33.500 for them to land. Because the Liberals, because of the news cycle, became the safe place to land. But
00:19:38.220 now I'm just ranting on about something else. Anyways, see you guys later.