The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 11, 2024


The ticking time bomb in Justin Trudeau's government

Topics
Arrive-Can scandal and Liberal Party corruption corruption in government procurement scandal implications for Trudeau government
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Larry Brock Jean Chrétien Christian Firth Erin O'Toole Paul Martin Emily Bronte Kretchen Jahari
How the Conservatives & Poilievre Win in 2025 Recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek! (Calgary's Union Mayor)

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

176.23

Word count

2,810

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the Arrive-Canberra scandal, and why it looks a lot like the sponsorship scandal with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, but on a much larger scale. I also talk about why this scandal is a big deal, and what it could mean for the Trudeau government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It speaks to the sorry state of affairs in Canada that there's so much corruption around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government that I frankly haven't touched the Arrive-Can-Hap scandal, because on its face, at least to me, it didn't look like anything more than typical Liberal government graft, awarding sole source contracts to Liberal Party friends who are completely incompetent to actually fulfill the contracts, so they just subcontract it out to other people, and then they keep a big chunk of money themselves for effectively acting as glorified middlemen.
00:00:30.000 But when I actually look deeper into it, I actually agree with Conservative Party MPs that this is really bad.
00:00:36.400 It actually kind of is uncovering a new type of corruption that we haven't seen in this Liberal government that goes past just giving out financial awards to people who have done a lot of work for the Liberal Party behind the scenes.
00:00:48.200 This is now turning into basically a full network of corruption, a lot like the Chrétien sponsorship scandal from the early, like sort of later 90s, early 2000s.
00:00:58.120 And so I want to get into a video that Conservative MP Larry Brock posted, but to basically give a short overview myself, effectively what went on is a $53 million contract was awarded to Liberal friends, or at least this random, flunky app development organization that wasn't actually qualified to actually create the Arrive-Can app to do the whole COVID passport type thing.
00:01:22.720 And so not only did they contract out to other people, the vast majority of the money that was then paid out to everyone who was either on the contract or subcontracted went to literally nothing.
00:01:35.960 No work was done. It was effectively probably Liberal Party insiders being just paid out millions of dollars from Canadian taxpayer money through a shady app development organization who does not actually develop apps.
00:01:50.340 It is absolutely wild. And when I say that this is a lot like the sponsorship scandal, the thing with the sponsorship scandal with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin was that they only spent about $3 million.
00:02:02.420 Larry Brock will get into this, but he doesn't explain what the sponsorship scandal is. Obviously, it's a tight video he's making. He wasn't going to do all that history.
00:02:10.940 But the sponsorship scandal was the Liberal government back in the 90s and early 2000s, spending a few million dollars in Quebec to basically promote all the programs and services and achievements the federal Liberal government has done in order to try and stave off separatist sort of feelings within Quebec, basically spread propaganda in order to, you know, make the Liberal government look really good and encourage Quebecers to stay.
00:02:34.820 That's not scandalous at all. What was scandalous was the fact that the vast majority of the money in the sponsorship scandal did not go to anyone who was actually doing advertising work.
00:02:45.180 Some of it definitely did, but a lot of it ended up just going to Liberal Party friends who were then taking this taxpayer money from the Liberal government and then donating back maxed out donations to the Liberal government.
00:02:56.760 Multiple people were doing this. So it was effectively the Liberal government giving itself taxpayer money. Absolutely insane.
00:03:03.840 Or the Liberal Party giving itself taxpayer money that the Liberal government handed off to Liberal Party insiders. Insane.
00:03:10.520 And this is why this Arrive Can scam scandal is actually like a ticking time bomb right now in Justin Trudeau's government, because it looks and smells a lot like sponsorship, but on a much larger scale.
00:03:23.740 Now, when these app contractors are taking this $53 million, they're obviously keeping a large chunk themselves, but then 75% of the money does not go to anyone doing any work on the app.
00:03:35.180 Well, I wonder how much money ended up coming back to the Liberal government through this web of sort of handouts that was going on.
00:03:41.980 Something is obviously going on, and Justin Trudeau and the NDP are really hurting for cash.
00:03:47.960 So I could see the Liberals using this as a device to try and top up their actual donations, because they have been getting clobbered by the Conservatives.
00:03:57.340 But anyways, I'm going to pass it over to Larry Brock in just a second, but I just want to quickly mention that I, Wyatt Claypool, someone in the last video said I should say my name slower.
00:04:05.420 So I, Wyatt Claypool, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:04:10.800 So if you live on the west side of Calgary, please buy a Conservative Party membership.
00:04:15.960 Check out my website in the description below, WyattClaypool.com, and let's make sure that we actually have real Conservatives representing strong Conservatives' writings like Signal Hill.
00:04:25.260 There's a bunch of pro-lockdown people, pro-censorship people, very liberal equity candidates trying to run in my area, and we want to be able to stop them.
00:04:33.760 So we actually have solid Conservative representation.
00:04:37.460 Anyways, here's Larry Brock, and I'll let him take it away to explain what was going on here.
00:04:43.300 Hello, friends.
00:04:44.580 You won't believe what we learned last week at Committee.
00:04:48.300 GC Strategies, that two-person firm working out of their basement, is facing even more controversy with its multi-million dollar contract with the government and the Arrive Can app.
00:04:59.660 This scam has grown to alarming rates.
00:05:02.620 Let's put this into perspective.
00:05:04.680 The sponsorship scandal that brought down the Chrétien Liberal government was only $3 million.
00:05:11.120 Arrive Scam has already fleeced the taxpayers for $54 million, 18 times more than that previous scandal.
00:05:20.360 The procurement ombudsman in his report confirmed that 76% of subcontractors did not perform any work on the app.
00:05:30.300 So I got a couple of those numbers wrong.
00:05:32.660 It was $54 million, not $53 million, and it was $76, not $75 million.
00:05:37.180 So don't come at me.
00:05:38.340 I was literally only a single digit off.
00:05:40.320 But yeah, this is a very good way of explaining it from Larry Brock.
00:05:43.100 It's not zero, yet GC Strategies build millions of dollars for these so-called services.
00:05:50.440 Remember that the Arrive Can app was originally budgeted for only $80,000.
00:05:55.940 And to put that into perspective, we had some skilled Canadian tech developers duplicate the app from scratch in a weekend for just a few thousands of dollars.
00:06:07.340 No wonder why the ombudsman referred to this as a bait and switch, which means a fraudulent sales practice where a purchaser, in our case, you, the taxpayer,
00:06:18.780 is attracted by advertisement of a low-priced service, but then is forced to purchase a higher-priced one.
00:06:27.260 Since 2017, GC Strategies has received $46 million in federal funding and was the largest single beneficiary of the Arrive Can app.
00:06:38.920 Simply put, the Trudeau government has rigged the system to prefer GC Strategies in the awarding of contracts.
00:06:48.060 And you've got to wonder specifically why the Liberal Party is even willing to do something that on its face looks so scandalous.
00:06:56.480 It's a sole source contract to two random guys, and they're subcontracting out like it's nobody's business.
00:07:04.520 Everybody's being subcontracted out.
00:07:06.280 Like, probably a member of my family was probably subcontracted out on this.
00:07:10.440 There's just so much money flying around.
00:07:11.980 Not actually, don't come at me.
00:07:13.580 But like that, I don't understand. 0.95
00:07:15.920 And so when you look at this, you have to think, why would you take such a stupid risk on these two guys spending this much money for a product that barely worked at all 0.97
00:07:25.720 and shouldn't have ever been actually contracted to be built because all the COVID vaccine mandates were completely insane and authoritarian? 0.67
00:07:33.300 But you've got to think that if an investigator dives deeper into this, if an investigator get, when the report on Monday is released on kind of just all the financial issues that went on here,
00:07:46.160 there should be a further RCMP investigation into the PMO or into any ministry connected with this so they can figure out who got money
00:07:54.300 and did any of those people actually give donations to the Liberal Party of Canada?
00:07:58.960 Because easily all of them would get a tax credit for doing it anyways.
00:08:02.640 So a lot of these people probably, as some sort of a requirement in order to get money, had to give money back to the Liberal Party in some way.
00:08:11.320 Maybe it didn't happen, but the Liberal government, far less corrupt Liberal governments like the Chrétien government, have done it before,
00:08:18.560 and I wouldn't put anything past Trudeau.
00:08:20.880 And to add insult to injury, these two guys consistently did not document their services.
00:08:28.140 As per the Ombudsman, GC Strategy submitted shoddy paperwork, so significant that it stood out as an outlier from others.
00:08:37.040 Let's remember previous testimony from Christian Firth, one of the two founders of this so-called consulting firm.
00:08:44.280 He confirmed that he made a mistake when he intentionally doctored resumes from Butler AI.
00:08:52.340 Not once, but numerous times.
00:08:55.760 It's no wonder the RCMP are investigating Mr. Firth and his company for criminality.
00:09:02.420 As a word of advice, do not use AI.
00:09:05.080 But let us not forget, this egregious, unlawful scheme in government procurement has been allowed to grow under Justin Trudeau for the last eight years.
00:09:16.560 Just imagine, what other schemes are out there?
00:09:20.500 Federal outsourcing has increased to $14.6 billion just in the last year.
00:09:26.080 That's 74% higher than when Trudeau promised in 2015 to cut back on the use of external consultants.
00:09:35.640 I will continue to fight on your behalf and shed light.
00:09:39.060 So I'm going to cut him off there, but Larry Brock is doing great work.
00:09:42.440 I will link his video in the description all as well for X if you guys want to go and share and like his video.
00:09:49.840 It's very good.
00:09:50.620 But he's right that there is easily, if this is what's going on with this singular app, or at least with this GC firm, this two guys since 2017, there's got to be something else going on.
00:10:05.180 And so we shouldn't be thinking of corruption as this single vector kind of issue where Trudeau government gives money to a former liberal MP who ends up basically procuring cheap masks from some subcontractor and they fulfill their COVID mask contract and they get a big piece of cut of money, even though he had literally nothing to do with it.
00:10:26.040 I think it was ventilators that there was a former MP involving a scam with.
00:10:29.600 But that's a very one line kind of a scam.
00:10:32.740 Liberal Party gives money to a liberal individual who they probably owe a bunch of favors to.
00:10:37.440 That's corruption.
00:10:38.440 That's already bad. 0.59
00:10:39.580 Socialist contracts are cancerous.
00:10:41.560 But this one's even worse where it's such a massive amount of money going to a couple guys who it'd be insane to think that they're not friends with somebody in the liberal government or party.
00:10:52.940 And that when the money is going to not just one other subcontractor who made the app and then passed it back, this is going to hundreds, if not thousands of people who are getting a cut of this.
00:11:03.420 And when you're doing something like that, it's very easy to hide some sort of money laundering in two parties.
00:11:09.940 And that's why the committee that was investigating this, the bloc, NDP and liberals, all shut down any further investigations.
00:11:17.540 I want to read a couple of lines from a Globe and Mail article about this.
00:11:21.820 It's absolutely insane the way that they're just so brazen about covering this up.
00:11:26.620 There is one line I want to get to.
00:11:28.500 Yeah.
00:11:28.820 So this is Maja Jahari, who is the vice chairman of this committee set up to investigate this scandal.
00:11:35.320 And he said, now we're seeing OMG based on this report.
00:11:39.020 This is even going deeper than we expected.
00:11:41.140 So it is not that we don't want to do the study or we are trying to hide something, said Mr. Jahari.
00:11:46.540 But no means is our side trying to stop studying Arrive Can.
00:11:50.660 What we're suggesting is a pause.
00:11:53.200 So it's not they're not blocking the investigation.
00:11:55.340 They just don't want the investigation moving forward in any way.
00:11:58.820 And he even, Jahari, described this report as scary.
00:12:03.020 I bet it's scary.
00:12:04.300 But he kind of buys it back and then says, well, it's scary because it seems like it might be slandering good people and they're going too far.
00:12:12.960 I've never seen the Liberal Party actually care about people's personal privacy.
00:12:17.740 Just look at the COVID era.
00:12:18.980 They could care less.
00:12:20.620 They don't actually care.
00:12:21.860 I think that they know if they go far enough, they're going to find someone who has a connection back to the Liberal Party or different firms that were giving money to them.
00:12:30.960 This is why this is a ticking time bomb.
00:12:33.020 Because if it comes back that the Liberal government is just effectively stealing taxpayer money and then giving it back to themselves, it killed the Kretchen government with $3 million.
00:12:42.420 You better believe it's going to kill a Trudeau government with $54 million.
00:12:46.780 At least with SNC-Lavalin, you could argue. 0.99
00:12:50.180 It's still asinine to do.
00:12:52.180 But you could argue that they're trying to protect people's jobs because they don't want SNC to lose a bunch of contracts and a bunch of people go out of work. 0.98
00:12:59.340 It's a stupid argument still because a lot of those contracts that SNC-Lavalin was taking, the public contracts, would just go to other firms. 0.60
00:13:07.460 Other firms would even just be creative, thin air, in order to fulfill such lucrative contracts. 0.99
00:13:12.440 It would happen.
00:13:13.260 Money motivates people.
00:13:14.780 We charity, you could say that at least we was technically going to fulfill some educational requirements, some educational services that the government wanted to offer.
00:13:25.440 And effectively, the scandals part was Liberal Party or Justin Trudeau family members were getting paid to do speaking at these charity events.
00:13:35.640 It really doesn't matter if the Trudeau family gets another $50,000, $60,000, which was what that scandal was about.
00:13:43.220 In a certain sense, yes, that's bad.
00:13:45.200 It should defeat any government, but at least it's not actually couldn't go towards potentially trying to illicitly fund an election campaign through taxpayer money being handed back to the Liberal Party.
00:13:58.380 That's what makes this one so bad, is that there is election implications to what the Liberals are doing, that they could potentially boost up their pot of money out of nowhere through sending money out to a spider web of Trudeau or Liberal allies, and then having them send a portion of it to the party and getting tax credits in order to do so.
00:14:18.640 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:14:21.860 I want to talk a little bit about the scandal more in the future in more granular detail on little things that come out.
00:14:27.760 I will definitely be talking about that report that's going to come out Monday, as Larry Brock was going to get to in his video.
00:14:33.360 I've linked his Twitter video in the description below.
00:14:36.200 I also have my usual Give, Send, Go link down there for the legal fund.
00:14:39.880 We have a silly developer trying to sue us over defamation, in which we had a guest writer mention him in an article about Aaron O'Toole, and everything that was mentioned about him was based off a report by the Globe and Mail that already came out two years before.
00:14:54.320 And so he's suing us over us saying nothing new about him, and he just thinks that he can bully us into silence, even though the Globe and Mail article is still up and has never had to issue it to retraction, because frankly, everything said in it was true.
00:15:05.580 And then also, again, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination, so if you live in Calgary Signal Hill, check out my website, wyattclaypool.com, buy a membership, and let's make sure we have real conservatives in Conservative Party ridings.
00:15:19.540 Just like in Burlington, if you live in Burlington, vote in the nomination for Emily Brown, and in a future video, I'll see if I can create a list of other people and other nominations that are worth backing.
00:15:30.100 But regardless of what ride you guys live in, buy a CPC membership, a Conservative membership, get involved in your local board, get involved in your nomination races, so we can make sure that red Tories or defecting liberals don't try and sneak in to a poly of government.
00:15:45.680 Anyways, that should be it for me today. Thanks for listening to my ramblings.
00:15:49.660 It's been a bit of a longer video, but I hope that this has at least given you an insight onto the scope of how bad a Rive scam is going to be.