Mario Beaulieu

“Mr. Speaker, in 1541, Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River on his third voyage to Canada and made camp at Cap-Rouge, just upstream from where Quebec City stands today. His men looked down at the riverbank and could not believe their eyes. The rocks were glittering. They thought they had found more gold than they could carry. They filled their barrels with it. Cartier was so eager to get back home that he left in the middle of the night and sailed for France. The treasure was tested in France. The diamonds were quartz and the gold was iron pyrite. It was fool’s gold. Canada has a long history of fool’s gold, dating back to the earliest European explorers. Today, the fool’s gold glitters from the Prime Minister’s promise to buy Canadian. Last year, the Prime Minister promised, “we will select Canadian suppliers by default”. He promised Canada would become “our own best customer”. Canadians believed it because they wanted to, but there is a simple way to tell real gold from fool’s gold: rubbing the stone across a piece of white porcelain. Real gold leaves a yellow streak, and fool’s gold leaves a black one. Let us put the Liberals’ buy Canadian policy to the streak test. Last year, the government posted a tender for security guards at the Canada Revenue Agency. For years, that work had been done by the Commissionaires, a Canadian not-for-profit founded in 1925 to employ veterans. Written on the government’s tender was the statement, “This solicitation is open only to Canadian suppliers.” However, in June, the Liberals awarded the contract, worth nearly $12 million, to the Universal Protection Service. The Universal Protection Service is a subsidiary of Allied Universal, which is an American company with headquarters in Pennsylvania and California. The difference in price between the two bids was about $80,000. On a $12-million contract, that is less than 1% of the contract’s value. For less than a penny on the dollar, the Liberals chose an American multinational over Canada’s largest private employer of veterans. As I said earlier, the Liberals’ buy Canadian policy was nothing more than fool’s gold. The policy is so fake that under the government’s own definitions, the Chinese-owned company Huawei would count as a Canadian supplier. The Prime Minister promised that when Ottawa spends money, it will choose Canadian suppliers by default, so the first question is a simple one: What does the Liberal government think makes a company Canadian? If someone wants to put a “product of Canada” label on a jar of strawberry jam, the government says that around 98% of the main ingredients and virtually all the processing and labour have to be Canadian. However, if someone wants to be a Canadian supplier, under the Liberal government’s buy Canadian policy, they simply need to register a business in Canada, meaning they essentially only need an address. There is no requirement to have a Canadian headquarters, Canadian ownership or even a minimum number of Canadian workers. That means that the strawberry jam on our toast is held to a higher standard of being Canadian than the American firm that was just awarded a $12-million contract over Canada’s largest private employer of veterans. Let us take the Liberals’ definition of a so-called Canadian supplier one step further and apply it to the suppliers the government itself calls a threat. Huawei, a Chinese-owned firm, has a Canadian office in Markham, Ontario. The government banned Huawei from our 5G networks on national security grounds. However, under the Liberals’ buy Canadian policy, Huawei would be considered a Canadian supplier because it registered a subsidiary with the CRA. In the eyes of the Liberals, foreign-owned companies like Huawei are just as Canadian as a local hardware store on main street. We have seen this failure before. Indigenous business leaders called it “renting a feather”, when a non-indigenous company was putting an indigenous person’s name on the ownership papers to win federal contracts set aside for indigenous businesses. Earlier this year, the procurement ombudsman warned that non-indigenous businesses may use indigenous businesses as shell companies. If the government could not stop businesses from pretending they were indigenous-owned, why would anyone believe it would stop them from pretending they are Canadian? I was just in Sarnia, where a local business owner told me he was surprised to learn that several corporations were registered on his local residential street with no sign of an office or any operations. The Prime Minister cannot pretend he did not see this loophole coming. After years at Brookfield, a company with dozens of subsidiaries registered in offshore tax havens, he knows exactly how corporations exploit loopholes to game the system. He knew that his policy was fool’s gold, but he sold it to Canadians anyway. Next week, Canadians will remember the people who served our country in uniform, so it is fair to ask why the government chose to end an 80-year promise to Canada’s veterans. Many Canadians walk past a commissionaire without knowing the story behind their uniform. The Canadian Corps of Commissionaires was founded in 1925 to provide employment to soldiers coming home from the First World War. In 1945, as hundreds of thousands more soldiers came home from the Second World War, Ottawa made them a promise: When the federal government needed guards for its buildings, the Commissionaires would get the first right of refusal. That promise was kept by every government and every party for 80 years, but in February of this year, the Liberal Minister of Veterans Affairs wrote to tell them that the promise was over. Her letter said that the government was confident the corps was positioned for “continued success in this new procurement environment”. Less than four months later, the Commissionaires found out what that new environment looks like under the Liberals. The government awarded the security contract the Commissionaires had held to a subsidiary of an American company, Allied Universal. Allied Universal reportedly took more than $290 million U.S. in contracts from the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security this year alone. That is who the Liberals chose over Canada’s veterans, while they told Canadians to put their elbows up. When Cartier got his barrels of treasure back to France, it did not take long for the truth to come out. With a simple test, everyone could see that it was fool’s gold. The Liberals’ buy Canadian policy has been tested now, too. It has failed the test. What frustrates me the most is that the real gold in the story was right in front of them the whole time. For 100 years, the Commissionaires have been standing guard at the doors of our federal buildings as Canadian veterans. That is the real gold in this, but the government shamefully traded it for fool’s gold.”