Contractor faces parliamentary rebuke
GC Strategies partner reprimanded over March testimony before Commons committee
An ArriveCan contractor at the centre of a political firestorm over government contracting practices endured an age-old and rarely invoked public reprimand Wednesday after evading questions at a parliamentary committee this year.
GC Strategies partner Kristian Firth was admonished by the Speaker of House of Commons on Wednesday as he stood “before the bar” — a brass rod near the entrance to the lower chamber that cannot be crossed by “uninvited representatives of the Crown.”
From his position at the other end of the chamber, Speaker Greg Fergus formally admonished Firth in what he called an “historic event,” as Firth stood behind the bar, clasping his hands and staring straight ahead.
He then sat down and began taking a series of heated questions from MPs, who last week passed a motion ordering Firth’s reprimand and requiring that he face parliamentarians to fill gaps in the testimony he gave at the Commons operations committee in March.
The committee was studying the government’s handling of the ArriveCan app, which served as Canada’s main COVID-19 screening tool. ArriveCan costs ballooned to around $59.5 million, Canada’s auditor general Karen Hogan concluded in February, because the Liberal government “repeatedly failed” to manage every stage of the app’s development.
Hogan’s damning performance audit also looked at GC Strategies: the two-person Ottawa IT firm she estimated was paid $19.1 million to work on the app, despite reportedly outsourcing the bulk of that work to subcontractors. Hogan said the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had little evidence to support “how and why” GC Strategies was awarded the ArriveCan contract, and noted there were “flaws” in contracting processes that appeared to favour the firm.
Firth has disputed some of Hogan’s findings, stating his firm received less money than reported and casting blame on the government’s poor record-keeping — something Hogan also noted.
Wednesday’s censure marked the first time a private citizen has been rebuked through the archaic protocol since 2021, when the then-president of the Public Health Agency of Canada was hauled before the Speaker for failing to hand over to a committee documents tied to the firing of scientists from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab.
But before that, it had been more than 100 years since a private citizen had been subjected to the parliamentary power. In that 1913 case, the individual in question refused to answer committee questions, again chose not to address questions after being called before the bar, and was later imprisoned.
In Firth’s March committee appearance, which took place a month after that report dropped, he avoided answering a number of questions, at times citing ongoing investigations both related and unrelated to the pandemic-era app. While committee witnesses are permitted to object to questions they are posed, they are still compelled to answer them.
Just before Firth’s rebuke in the House on Wednesday, the RCMP told the Star it had executed a search warrant one day earlier at an address previously connected to Firth and GC Strategies in Woodlawn, Ont.
The RCMP said its Sensitive and International Investigations unit conducted the search but that it was “not related to the ArriveCan investigation.”
In response to questions from Conservative MP Michael Barrett, Firth said the search involved the seizure of “electronic goods” and was tied to a separate matter concerning the software company Botler AI.
The RCMP has been probing allegations from Botler about questionable contracting processes and the relationships between the public service and IT firms. The company had been working on a chatbot unrelated to ArriveCan, and its developers had communicated with Firth about the project.
Firth said he welcomed the investigation and said he believed it would “exonerate” his firm.
When asked by the NDP’s Taylor Bachrach whether he would have done anything differently over the course of his multiple committee appearances in months and years past, Firth said: “absolutely.”
“I would have answered the questions more concisely, taken more time in giving … the answers, and putting all written information back to the committee faster,” said Firth.
The Green Party’s Elizabeth May said the issue was not with the conciseness of Firth’s previous answers, but rather their accuracy, which prompted Firth to acknowledge that there were “a lot of mistakes” he’d made.
Conservative MP Larry Brock also asked Firth whether “the prime minister, the Liberal cabinet ministers and certain members of the Liberal backbench should be at this bar facing consequences.”
Firth said he found the question too “speculative” to answer.
While Wednesday’s antics may have represented an unusual use of the parliamentary protocol, they also did little to unearth significant revelations.