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‘Insider’ connected to ArriveCAN app to testify before House of Commons committee

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The once-mandatory ArriveCAN app cost taxpayers over $50 million, $8.9 million of which was given to an obscure company called GC Strategies which was operated by a two-man team out of an Ontario home.

Canadian MPs investigating the federal government’s $54 million controversial COVID-era ArriveCAN travel app are today questioning an “insider” connected to the app who was claimed to have boasted he “rubbed shoulders” with every assistant “deputy minister in town.”  

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the “insider” to testify before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) as to his involvement with the travel app is consultant Vaughn Brennan, who was  reluctantly named as a witness.

According to subcontractors involved in the ArriveCAN app, Brennan had been named as a “self-styled political insider.” 

According to witnesses, Brennan said he had “rubbed shoulders with every assistant deputy minister in town” and thought that the $23 million being spent on a sole-sourced contract was “a drop in the bucket.”  

To date, Brennan has never spoken publicly about his involvement with the ArriveCAN app, however, it has been confirmed he did work with ArriveCAN consultant GC Strategies Incorporated.  

The once-mandatory ArriveCAN app cost taxpayers over $50 million, $8.9 million of which was given to an obscure company called GC Strategies which was operated by a two-man team out of an Ontario home.  

The OGGO is investigating how various companies such as Dalian, Coaradix, and GC Strategies received millions in taxpayer dollars to develop the contentious quarantine-tracking ArriveCAN app.  

LifeSiteNews last year reported how two tech entrepreneurs testified before the committee that during the development of the ArriveCAN travel app they saw firsthand how federal managers engaged in “extortion,” “corruption,” and “ghost contracting,” all at the expense of taxpayers. 

Canada’s Auditor General Karen Hogan announced an investigation of the ArriveCAN app in November of 2022, after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.  

‘Systemic corruption’ within Trudeau federal government ‘evident to everyone,’ says Conservative MP 

Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Stephanie Kusie noted to the committee on October 26, 2023, that it should be “evident to everyone in this room as well as Canadians,” that there is “systemic corruption within this government,” when speaking about ArriveCAN. She added that government corruption “should be absolutely evident.” 

According to CPC MP Kelly McCauley, who is chair of the committee, Brennan had declined to testify before it, adding that “GC Strategies is playing hard to get.”  

“That would be a polite way of saying it,” said McCauley. 

“We have not been able to get a commitment from them despite our clerk going above and beyond in trying to accommodate them. We’re having difficulties with them.”   

MPs on the OGGO, without any explanation, were told that a GC Strategies executive “routinely boasted he and his friends, senior government officials with contracting authority, have ‘dirt on each other.’” 

Since 2022, GC Strategies has received some $44 million in federal contracts.  

Last year LifeSiteNews reported on how during a parliamentary investigation into the misuse of funds used to create the ArriveCAN travel app, Canada’s chief federal technology officer was threatened with contempt of Parliament charges for refusing to give clear answers to questions from MPs regarding his involvement with the much-maligned app.   

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary. 

When the app was mandated, all travelers entering Canada had to use it to submit their travel and contact information as well as any COVID vaccination details before crossing the border or boarding a flight.  

In October 2021, Trudeau announced unprecedented COVID-19 jab mandates for all federal workers and those in the transportation sector and said the unjabbed will no longer be able to travel by air, boat, or train, both domestically and internationally.  

This policy resulted in thousands losing their jobs or being placed on leave for non-compliance.  

Trudeau “suspended” the COVID travel vaccine mandates on June 20, 2022. Last October, the Canadian federal government ended all remaining COVID mandates in Canada regarding travel, including masking on planes and trains, COVID testing, and allowing vaccine-free Canadians to no longer be subject to mandatory quarantine. 

Over 700 vaccine-free Canadians negatively affected by federal COVID jab dictates have banded together to file a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  

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Canada’s Digital ID Drama Heats Up as Regulators Sidestep Parliament

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From Reclaim The Net

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These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.

And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.

Canadian regulators plan to move ahead with introducing national digital ID without the parliament’s involvement.

Leaving the process out of the parliament in terms of approval and oversight is sure to add to the existing controversy around the issue of digital ID, which was in the past criticized and even rejected precisely by a number of Canadian MPs and parliamentary committees.

On the other hand, this might explain why the regulators might rather take a route bypassing the lawmakers, despite the risky – in terms of proper democratic process – nature of such maneuvering.

Critics are now calling this (another) example of Canada’s Liberal government’s overreach.

Reports about these goings-on are based on Shared Services Canada (SSC), a government IT agency, recently announcing how the work on setting up a digital ID system for the whole country was progressing, while presenting this as essentially no different than current forms of obligatory ID (for instance, Canada’s equivalent to the social security number in the US).

But opponents in the parliament, and beyond, have been consistently for years reiterating that the scheme is fraught with dangers that are not comparable to those affecting traditional ID systems, neither in depth nor breadth.

These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.

And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.

But SSC and other digital ID backers address these issues almost in passing while selling the benefits to the public as more convenience via unified access to government services, and even as something “empowering” citizens.

However, what the most prominent individuals and organizations that push for global digital ID adoption (like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, the EU, and the WEF…) present as a way to usher in more equity and equality is seen as creating exactly the opposite effect.

“Segregation and discrimination” is how one report out of Canada put it, the context being recent: Covid vaccine “passports” and the treatment received by citizens who decided against taking the jab.

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Alberta

Media melts down as Danielle Smith moves to end ‘transitioning’ of children in Alberta

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From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.

A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation: 

  • The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law. 
  • The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors. 
  • The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.  

Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.

Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.  

The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.  

The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders. 

In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News: 

Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles. 

‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’

Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said. 

This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them. 

The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one: 

Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity. 

To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people. 

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture WarSeeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of AbortionPatriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life MovementPrairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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