Tamara Jansen

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Mr. Speaker, I have been looking closely at what the government is doing with the Defence Investment Agency in Bill C-31, and I have to say that the more I look into it, the more questions I have. Imagine my skepticism last October when the government announced it was creating a new Defence Investment Agency. We were told that it would speed things up. Creating yet another level of bureaucracy to fight bureaucracy seemed like a bad idea to me. Then they brought in Doug Guzman, a former senior banker and friend of the Prime Minister, to run the agency, promising procurements at speeds not seen in generations. Now, barely a year later, the government is back with another plan. Apparently, the agency it just created is not structured the way it would like, so now the government wants to turn it into a Crown corporation. I have spent a good part of my life in business, and I can say that when something is not working, the last thing anyone wants to do is add another layer of management. We should find out where the problem is and fix it. If people are sitting around waiting for approvals, we should figure out why those approvals are taking so long. We should not build an entirely new organization around the problem and hope things will somehow improve. However, that is what the government seems determined to do. What exactly have we accomplished over the past year? When Mr. Guzman appeared before committee, I wanted to understand what had actually changed since the DIA was created. Had it eliminated unnecessary approvals? Had it reduced the number of signatures required to get a contract approved? Could he point to a major procurement that had moved faster because of this new agency? When I hear the government celebrating another announcement about submarines or aircraft, I want to know whether our military is any closer to getting that equipment. It turns out that he admitted all of those projects were already under way long before the Defence Investment Agency existed, in 2016 or something like that. Believe me, I understand the frustration with government paperwork. I have dealt with enough of it as a farmer to know how ridiculous the requirements can be sometimes. Maybe people find themselves filling out forms to prove something that the government already knows, and then they wait weeks for someone to say they should have filled in a different form. I am all for getting rid of unnecessary red tape, but when we are talking about spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and changing the agency to a Crown corporation, I think we need to be very careful about which of the rules we will be getting rid of as we make those changes. Some of those approvals exist for a very good reason. They are there to make sure contracts are awarded fairly, public money is accounted for and somebody can be held responsible when things go wrong. I am particularly concerned about what happens to parliamentary oversight when we move these decisions into a Crown corporation. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report showing that over the next five years, the federal government is projected to run about $333 billion in deficits, but borrow almost $733 billion. That is a difference of roughly $400 billion. Honestly, Canadians must be shocked to hear that the government can borrow that much more money than what shows up in its reported deficits. It turns out that when government borrows money to make loans or investments through a Crown corporation, for example, those transactions do not necessarily count as expenses in the annual deficit. Will we know why one company received a contract instead of another? When something goes wrong, will the minister be responsible, or will we be told the Crown corporation is to blame? When government decisions go badly, Canadian taxpayers are the ones who bear that cost. That brings me to another part of this legislation that I find particularly troubling. The government is proposing broad powers to award defence contracts without going through a competitive bidding process. I understand that there are circumstances where that makes sense. If our military needs something urgently, or if there is only one company capable of providing a particular piece of equipment, obviously we need to move very quickly. However, when I read through the proposed exceptions, I was gobsmacked by how broadly some of them are written. I have to ask where Parliament fits into all of this. If the government can decide that a contract does not need competition, how are we supposed to know taxpayers are getting the best value? How are Canadian companies supposed to know they have been treated fairly? What safeguards will prevent political favouritism from influencing decisions that should be based on what our military actually needs? Let me give another example of why these safeguards matter. Canadians recently heard the Prime Minister talking about how Canada needs millions of military drones. I could not help wondering who was going to build all these drones and how that contract would be awarded. Well, it turns out that a fellow named Eliot Pence, who sits on a trade advisory board with the Prime Minister, conveniently started a company a little over a year ago called Dominion Dynamics. That company has since raised $139 million from an investment firm called Georgian. A man named David Court serves as chair of the advisory board of Georgian, is a member of the board of directors at Brookfield and was previously corporate director of Brookfield when the Prime Minister was chair of Brookfield. Coincidentally, Georgian has recently acquired defence contracts to produce drone vehicles, which will likely be in the millions of dollars, maybe billions. If the DIA turns into a Crown corporation, these kinds of shenanigans will all become so much easier to do. Contracts will be awarded to brand new companies with basically no track record because somebody happens to know the right people. Does this sound familiar? If the government wants to expand sole-sourcing powers while moving procurement into a Crown corporation, should we not be demanding more accountability, not less? I raised a similar concern when Mr. Guzman appeared before the committee earlier this year. I asked him whether defence dollars were at risk of being spent for market outcomes rather than giving our troops the right gear at the right time. His answer was that defence spending will be used to create Canadian economic growth. He said that National Defence needed to be “accepting of more than one solution”. Does that mean it might not get what it needs because a friend of a friend is opening a new business building knock-off night-vision goggles? Is that what he means by being accepting of more than one solution? I certainly want Canadian businesses to benefit from defence procurement. We have some remarkable manufacturers in this country, and I would love to see more of the equipment our armed forces use being made right here at home. If we are sending young Canadian pilots into dangerous situations, mothers want to know that the aircraft they are flying was chosen because it was the right aircraft for the job. They do not want political connections or investment announcements getting in the way of buying the right equipment. The government says there will still be oversight, a board of directors, audits and reporting requirements, but I want to know what happens before these enormous contracts are signed, not simply when it gets reported afterward. Sometimes the problem is not that we need another organization; it is that the organizations we already have are not working together efficiently. As with any business, we know what happens when too many people are involved in making a decision and nobody wants to take responsibility. Everything slows down, costs start climbing and eventually someone has to step in and sort it out. We do not fix that problem by handing someone the company’s chequebook and telling them they can make the decisions with fewer questions being asked. Our armed forces have waited long enough for the equipment they need, and we want to see it delivered as quickly as possible, but we also want to know that when billions of dollars are being spent, somebody is keeping an eye on the money. If the government can create a new agency one year, decide it needs replacing the next and then ask Parliament to give the replacement even more powers, we have every reason to ask whether we are solving a problem or being told, as in The Wizard of Oz, to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. So far, the only thing moving at speeds not seen in a generation seems to be the creation of more government bureaucracy. How many times does the Liberal government expect Canadians to fall for the same line? It is another agency, another reorganization and another promise to cut red tape, and now the Liberals want even more power to spend billions. When does someone finally have to answer for the results?