Matt Strauss

Mr. Speaker, Bruce Kennedy was born and raised in the Waterloo region. He founded Stance Healthcare, based in south Kitchener, where they manufacture furniture for hospitals. They employ 125 of my friends and neighbours. They are a homegrown success story, but now they are suffering from tariffs. Since the new round last month, they have already lost $2 million in tariff costs. This cannot go on. I contacted the Liberal Secretary of State for Small Business on Bruce's behalf. What she sent back was a list of announcements that the Prime Minister has made about support for tariff-affected businesses. That is all. It was a list of announcements. It is all talk and no results. Stance Healthcare has not received a penny in actual support. Bruce and his workers face an impossible decision. They cannot keep losing hundreds of thousands a month. They either have to move jobs across the border or lay off 125 hard-working Canadians. The Prime Minister promised to win this trade war. He promised to support struggling businesses. It is five minutes to midnight for Stance. I call upon the Prime Minister to keep his promises.

Mr. Speaker, Canadians know a cover‑up when they hear one. That was a cover‑up. They turned the cameras off on a scheduled meeting about the $300‑million PrescribeIT scandal. They cancelled tomorrow's meeting so they can continue to cover it up. Can they offer some fig leaf of an explanation to Canadians as to why they are playing these dirty tricks if it is not a cover‑up?

Mr. Speaker, Canada Health Infoway blew $300 million of taxpayer money on PrescribeIT. They have blown $1 billion over 10 years with nothing tangible to show for it. For six weeks, they have failed to produce the documents the health committee has ordered them to produce. The health minister now says this totally dysfunctional organization will undergo a mandate review. Can she tell us how long the review will take and how much money the review will cost? Why does she not take the obvious decision today and pull their $50 million of yearly funding now?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to be here so late. I am hoping that if some of the Liberals get sleepy enough, perhaps they will accidentally answer the questions and provide some light on what has gone on at PrescribeIT. We are here for this particular adjournment proceeding question because, on May 28, I pointed out to the health minister that she said in the House that she had spoken to the board of Canada Health Infoway, and subsequently that caused its million‑dollar CEO, Michael Green, to be fired. The only problem is that the chairman of that board said that the Minister of Health had never spoken to the board, so there was a clear discrepancy. We raised as a question of privilege at the committee that somebody was clearly not telling the truth. The minister responded during that question period, saying she meant that she had spoken with her representative on the board, so in a follow-up question, I asked if her representative had spoken to the chairman of the board. She said she was “not going to get into who said what”. Well, why on earth not? This matters. It is important, because it has to do with how the organization is governed. The next thing the minister said during that question period was that “Canada Health Infoway is a separate entity from the government.” Is that true? How can it possibly be true? If the minister appoints the board chair, subsequently appoints a direct representative of herself on the board and then gives instructions to that representative to fire the CEO, how on earth can the organization be said to be independent? I think, honestly, that this is how organizations come to be poorly governed. This is how they come to blow $300 million on a program that did not work but that should have been billed successfully for $5 million. The minister is making a Schrödinger’s cat out of responsibility. If she does something good, such as fire the million‑dollar CEO, that is because she is in charge, but if the organization does something bad, then suddenly it is at arm's length and she has no control over it. This cannot go on. Is she responsible for what goes on at Canada Health Infoway, or is she not? Is she responsible for how it spends taxpayers' money, or is she not? Does she have the power to fire the CEO, or does she not? I will tell the House who has the power to fire all of us: the taxpayer. Why will the minister not say who said what in the chamber, so the taxpayers can make a decision about who needs to be fired? Why will she not come to committee to answer these questions instead of sending attachés who, frankly, do not answer these questions when we ask? However, I am hopeful tonight, so here we go.

Mr. Speaker, I asked several very specific questions. I asked whether Canada Health Infoway is independent or not. I asked whether the Minister of Health has oversight on its funding or not. I asked whether the Minister of Health has the power to fire the CEO of Canada Health Infoway or not. I have asked whether the minister would come to health committee to explain these things in more detail. The member did not answer even one of those questions. It is 11 p.m. It costs money to keep the chamber open. Tens of thousands of people voted for me so I could ask these questions. Tens of thousands of people voted for the member so she could answer these questions. Why will she not just answer them and respect the House, respect the Speaker and respect the mace?

Mr. Speaker, here is a question the Minister of Health has never answered. She knows that PrescribeIT was a $300-million waste of taxpayer money. She knows the organization in charge of that program was so badly run she had to get the CEO fired just last month. Given that she knows all this, what I cannot understand is why she would give that same organization, one that cannot point to one tangible thing it has accomplished in 10 years, another $50 million of taxpayer money this year? It does not make sense.

Mr. Speaker, we are here tonight because, on May 6, I asked the Liberal Minister of Health how much more money she was planning on giving Canada Health Infoway, given that it had blown $300 million on PrescribeIT for no tangible benefit to the taxpayer. She answered that the CEO of Canada Health Infoway's “behaviour was [totally] unacceptable”, and that is why she asked the board of directors to fire him. Then she said that she was going to give Canada Health Infoway another $50 million this year. I will say, I am grateful that she gave a clear-cut, numerical answer rather than dodging the question. That is commendable. However, that clear-cut, numerical answer was totally unacceptable. Why would she give such a backward organization another $50 million this year? That is my question. I have a bit more time, so I want to say that I took the unprecedented step tonight of emailing this question to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health and the Minister of Health's staff. I would never break the rules in this place and comment on the presence or absence of another member; however, I do want to share that I have a terrible feeling that I will be disappointed and that neither of them will answer my question tonight. When this organization came to health committee, I asked its chair, after $4 billion had been pumped into this organization, after 20 years, could he name one tangible program, something it managed, directed, built or designed, that is currently benefiting taxpayers? He could not. He only said that it rolled out a lot of federal funding, answering in vague platitudes. It seems to me that Canada Health Infoway has become a slush fund. The Liberals shovel money at it and then Liberal insiders shovel money around, including to lobbying firms such as Crestview Strategy and, I think, Summer Strategies was the other one. Obviously, it is badly run. The Liberals say it is independent, but then the health minister calls it up and gets the CEO fired. Why would they give such a backward organization another $50 million this year?

Mr. Speaker, to answer the member's first question, I am terribly disappointed. That was no answer at all. I know my constituents very well. I am from the Waterloo region. It is the tech capital of Canada. My constituents, those who work in tech, would love to get a $50-million contract to do nothing. This organization, after 20 years and $4 billion, has done nothing tangible. I am asking the government why it is giving this organization another $50 million, and the member could not point to anything it is going to do. It is going to look at some things. He went to his doctor's office and the doctor was using technology. I am a doctor, and doctors use technology without Canada Health Infoway blowing $50 million on lobbying firms to tell us to use it. The government needs to stop it. My constituents beg the government to stop it. Do not give this $50 million away. Give it back to taxpayers, build hospitals or hire nurses with it, but stop doing this, please.

Mr. Speaker, in response to my question regarding PrescribeIT on May 6, the Minister of Health said that she spoke to the board of directors of Canada Health Infoway, causing them to fire their million-dollar CEO, Michael Green. However, just the day before, the chair of that board, Dr. Peter Vaughan, said that the health minister had never personally raised concerns with him or the board about the $300 million wasted on PrescribeIT. Both these statements cannot be true. Will the health minister tell us which statement was false?

Mr. Speaker, am I to understand the health minister spoke with her representative on the board, but that board member did not tell the chair of the board that she had spoken with him? Did he mislead a committee of this House? If so, will she have another conversation with her representative on the board to dismiss another executive at Canada Health Infoway?

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure today to welcome 58 students and staff from Jacob Hespeler Secondary School in my hometown of Hespeler, who are visiting Parliament Hill today to observe our democracy in action. These students are taking part in an important learning experience, gaining first-hand insight into Canada's parliamentary system, civic engagement and public service. I would like to recognize the dedication of the teachers and chaperones, Dave Lambert, Ashley Pederson, Mishelle Bird and Cole Boland, for helping to guide and inspire the next generation. I welcome all 58 members of the Jacob Hespeler Secondary School visiting today to Ottawa. I hope their visit encourages them to stay engaged and involved in shaping the future of our communities and our country. To the Liberal members across the aisle, Conservatives will be asking hard questions today that pertain to the real-life future prospects of these young people. I beg them to try actually answering today and put on a proper show.

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals gave $300 million to Canada Health Infoway to build PrescribeIT, which the minister now acknowledges was a total failure. However, here is the problem. The board of Canada Health Infoway only fired its million‑dollar CEO after Conservatives raised these failures at the health committee. How much more money does the health minister plan to give this very badly run organization this year? I would like just the number of dollars, please.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my speech by thanking OpenMedia, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and privacy lawyer David Fraser for their excellent work on Bill C-22. The analysis I am about to offer closely mirrors their own, and if the Liberal government members would simply listen seriously to these civil liberties groups, they would not have to hear from me on this bill, but they have not, so here we are. At around age 13, I was horrified to read the following excerpt from chapter 1 of George Orwell's 1984: The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made...would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision...he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork. That gave me a chill down the spine 27 years ago. Could people really live with the government listening to their every utterance, watching their every move? How could the human spirit ever flourish in the utter absence of basic privacy? Even at a much younger age, I knew it was basically wrong for my sister to go through the things in my room or for me to read her diary, not because any authority figure ever told me it was wrong, but because I knew it in my soul. One cannot develop one's thoughts, one's feelings, one's self under prying eyes. That was just respect to my friends and family. What if a power as great as the government or the police violated our privacy? I knew that my mother and her family had escaped a Communist regime in the 1960s, but back then, telescreens were science fiction. Could my family have managed to plan their escape if a telescreen had been in their home? I knew vaguely that there had been revolutions in East Germany and throughout the U.S.S.R., but even in 1989, when those revolutions started, the telescreen idea remained in the realm of science fiction. Fast-forward to today, I am more horrified today. We now have the technological capability to make telescreens. I have a phone in my pocket and an Apple Watch on my wrist. I am most horrified because, with the legislation before us, the Liberal government is attempting to make possible the 1984 telescreen out of every cell phone, AirPod, Apple Watch, smart TV and automobile, anything that is connected to the Internet. To quote the excerpt from 1984 again, “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” I know the members opposite will consider my views outlandish, but they are not. Let me please take them through their own law to show them how they are doing the exact thing they swore they would never do. Proposed subsection 5(2) says: The Governor in Council [which means the government] may make regulations respecting the obligations of core providers, including regulations respecting (a) the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed In plain English, this means a back door. Right now, it is my understanding that my watch listens to everything I say. If I say, “Hey, Siri”, it sends whatever speech follows to the cloud for processing. If I do not say, “Hey, Siri”, nothing goes to the cloud. Proposed paragraph 5(2)(a) allows the minister to require that Apple build in the ability for authorities to listen to my Apple Watch whether I say, “Hey, Siri” or not. The same would go for my phone and my AirPods. Yes, they would need a warrant to actually listen in, but this bill takes the huge first step of building the surveillance architecture in the first place. Once it is built, it will be ripe for abuse either by the government or by hackers. Once it is built, it will not be unbuilt. We are at the stage where the government builds all the telescreens and puts them in our home, but promises to only use them if we have been bad. What is worse is this bill, as pertains to electronic service providers under proposed section 7, such as Apple, Signal, Telegram or Tinder, may be forced to keep that back door secret. Proposed section 15 says: An electronic service provider and any person acting on its behalf must not disclose any of the following information (c) the fact that the electronic service provider is subject to the order; In plain English, this section sets out the fact that the government has ordered construction of a back door to be kept secret. Once this bill passes, our cell phone manufacturer, our messaging service, our dating app may receive a secret order to build a back door into the service for the government to check in on us, and we might never be alerted. Our excerpt from the 1984 says, “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork.” Why? Why, if everything here was above board, would the bill include the ability for the public safety minister to build secret back doors? I do not happen to be one of them, but some Canadians might say it is okay to read their Tinder messages, that they do not care, but to at least tell them if the government is going to do that. This bill specifically allows a minister to do it secretly. Why? Just on these points alone, the construction of a backdoor surveillance architecture and that they intend to keep some parts of this architecture secret, the Liberals should hang their heads in shame. Liberals are supposed to fight against this sort of excessive government reach. They are not supposed to be its source, and it only gets worse. As set forth in proposed paragraph 5(2)(d), in addition to demanding that secret back doors be constructed, the government's ministers can order all electronic service providers to collect and store all metadata for a year. Metadata means many things, but the most important thing to me is location. This bill goes even further than the telescreens in 1984. It would turn every Internet-connected device into not just a listening device, but a tracking device as well, and it would cause that location data to be admissible in a court of law. Let me just give a couple of examples for why I find this concerning. We just had a pandemic, in which some governments went way too far restricting human rights in unscientific ways. Do people remember the red zones and the green zones or the six-person bubbles? It may surprise the House to learn that I never broke a single COVID rule, even though I was a strong critic of their unscientific basis, but I know that a lot of people did. I know that some people sitting on the government side of the House did. It is a matter of public record that Justin Trudeau broke COVID rules and broke the Reopening Ontario Act by attending a Black Lives Matter protest here in Ottawa. If Bill C-22 passes, when there is another pandemic with some silly rules, any police officer could say they suspect that the member for Winnipeg North broke pandemic rules, get a warrant and see his location for every moment of the last 365 days. If he ever stepped into a red zone or ever broke quarantine, it would be game over. This capability would not be merely for COVID laws. It would be for every law. Chrystia Freeland was once found guilty of going 30 kilometres an hour over the limit on the highway to see her dad. Once she was convicted of that, a police officer could check to see her speed for every moment of the 365 days preceding. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. As the head of Joseph Stalin's secret service said, “Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.” If everyone here is surveilled 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every one of us will be liable to be found guilty of something. If the government of the day passes this bill in its present form, I fear that the Liberals may live to see the day when its provisions are used against them. I swear it will not be me doing it, but who knows who will be prime minister in 2046. I fear her last name may be Trudeau-Perry. The Liberals will rue the day they torched all our collective privacy rights. I urge them to correct course. We can catch bad guys without violating the privacy rights of every single Canadian.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is very interesting that the member disagreed with everything I said but failed to point to one specific piece of my analysis that was wrong. Every piece of my analysis was correct. As to this talking point, I keep hearing that all the Five Eyes are doing it. I am proud to be Canadian. I am proud to have been born in the freest country in the land, and God help me, I am going to keep it that way. Just because the member's friends are all jumping off a cliff, it does not mean that the member should too.

Mr. Speaker, the best way to keep a year's worth of surveillance location data secure is to not build a back door or to not save it in the first place. There is some bizarre verbiage in this bill about systemic vulnerabilities, but the point of part 2 of this legislation, as it currently stands, is to build the systemic vulnerabilities that it later says it is not building. It is frankly doublespeak at this point, and it needs to be significantly reworked.

Mr. Speaker, I am relying on the video that privacy lawyer David Fraser put together on the topic. I urge every member of the House, particularly those on the government benches, to see it. It is not outlandish. He is a very credible voice. He teaches at Dalhousie University. He speaks about the Salt Typhoon incident in which the Americans, one of those Five Eyes partners that my colleague from Winnipeg North is so eager to emulate, built these sorts of back doors into their messaging services. The first thing that happened was that the Chinese Communist Party hacked into them and got everybody's private conversations. It is a real threat. If the NSA is subject to this sort of data exploitation by the Chinese Communist Party, I suspect that our country, having just initiated this new security partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, would be even more at risk.

Mr. Speaker, I am a great fan of my colleague who asked the question. I myself am a city boy, and I do not understand the metaphor. Can I just say what is particularly galling to me about this legislation? Conservatives like law and order. We support the police. We want bad guys in jail. We have put forward dozens, at this point—

Mr. Speaker, I have come over to the government's side temporarily to offer my question today, because I think it is a common-sense, bipartisan question. I think that anybody on the Liberal side or the Conservative side of the House should be able to ask this sort of question and get a reasonable response. I certainly did not want to be here tonight. I asked what I thought was a very reasonable question to my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health. She did not really answer it, and that is why I am here tonight. I am going to try asking it again, and I am going to beg her to answer it this time. For folks following at home, I will explain that the Liberal government in the last Parliament spent $250 million on a program called PrescribeIT, with the laudable goal of making it easier for physicians, such as me, to send prescriptions to the pharmacy. I am from the Waterloo region and went to the University of Waterloo. A lot of my friends are tech entrepreneurs and founders. Many of them are senior software developers at this stage of our life. I have asked them how much money this sort of thing should cost. They have said maybe $1 million, and $5 million maximum. There is no way it should have cost $250 million. The Liberals were spraying money from a firehose. It is incredible to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on something that should have cost 250 times less, but what is worse is that the program did not work. The Liberals know that it did not work, which is why they have cancelled it. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money on something that did not work, they are cancelling it. The taxpayer is getting nothing. I know that my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, was not here in the last Parliament. She did not sign the contract. The Prime Minister also was not here. There is no blame in it for either of them, but as a country, as a Parliament, we need to get to the bottom of this. It is Parliament's sacred duty to protect the taxpayer's dollar, and 250 million is a lot of dollars, so we would like to see the contract. We put forward a motion at the health committee to see the contract. The Government of Canada entered into that contract on behalf of the taxpayers and blew 250 million of their dollars. I think our bosses, the taxpayers, should get to see what the heck happened. My colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, spent two hours of our time filibustering the motion so as to not produce the document. The Prime Minister gave a speech today to reporters in which he said he does not like filibustering, and he criticized some Conservative members for speaking about “cats and dogs”. Does the Prime Minister know that the parliamentary secretary has been filibustering the document production order? Is he happy with that? Why is she doing it? Why will she not stop? Why will she not let the taxpayers see the contract so we can all stop this sort of waste and mismanagement from going forward in the future under the new government, as it likes to call itself? I am sitting close to the parliamentary secretary and can see that she has prepared remarks. I am begging her to put them away and just answer this very simple question for taxpayers: Why will she not just let us, as Canadians, taxpayers and residents in an open society, see the contract, please?

Mr. Speaker, out of respect for the health minister, I informed her office that I would be asking this question. I hope she respects the House enough to stand and answer it. The Liberals blew $250 million on PrescribeIT. That is the same amount they spent on the sponsorship scandal. Taxpayers got nothing for this money. The Liberals are outright cancelling the program, acknowledging that it was a total failure. Now Liberals are filibustering the health committee to prevent the disclosure of the contracts. Why do they not just let Canadians see the contracts so we can all try to prevent such boondoggles in the future?