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COVID-19

Tech entrepreneurs allege corruption, misuse of taxpayer funds in development of Canadian travel app

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

One of the experts who testified before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates recently exposed shady subcontracting deals that were not transparent during ArriveCan’s development

Two tech entrepreneurs recently testified before a government committee that during the development of the federal government’s much-maligned ArriveCAN travel app they saw firsthand how federal managers engaged in “extortion,” corruption, and “ghost contracting,” all at the expense of the taxpayer.

During a Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) meeting on October 26, Amir Morv, the co-founder of software company Botler AI, told Canadian MPs on the committee that “acts of misconduct rarely happen in isolation.”

“It is almost always symptomatic of a larger existence and tolerance of misconduct,” he said.

“Individuals engaged in such conduct are also prime targets of exploitation and extortion,” he said.

Botler, which is a Quebec-based company, was a subcontractor for the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) and recently exposed shady subcontracting deals that were not transparent during ArriveCan’s development.

According to a Globe and Mail report, the CBSA gave three companies involved in making the app more than $17 million.

Currently, the OGGO is investigating how various companies such as Dalian, Coaradix, and GC Strategies received millions of taxpayer money to develop the contentious ArriveCAN 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 COVID jab status.

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.

The program was once described by a Canadian border agent as “tyranny.” It cost taxpayers a whopping $54 million, which MPs pointed out was a suspiciously high expense.

LifeSiteNews reported earlier this month that the federal government was exposed for hiding a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation into the ArriveCan app from auditors.

Companies ‘openly’ engaged in various criminal activities

Morv and Botler co-founder Ritika Dutt testified to the committee about private conversations they had with a managing partner of GC Strategies Kristian Firth, a company with only two employees.

CSBA Director General Cameron MacDonald had urged the two to work directly with GC Strategies. However, the two quickly discovered that all of their work was being run through another company, called Dalian, but they were not told this.

Morv told MPs that the contractors are “openly engaged in various criminal activities” and that they openly “commit fraud on the government by promising influence and requesting material benefit” in return.

In essence, Morv exposed how private companies were being used to funnel taxpayer money into their coffers without public oversight.

Morv also claimed that Firth had regularly boasted that he and his friends, who were senior government officials with contracting authority, said they had “dirt” on each other, which was used as a sort of guaranteed mutual silence tactic regarding the corruption.

Notably, Morv stated that the contractors would not have acted in the way they did if they did not have “backing from factions within the government.”

He then said that part of the federal government had “mobilized to bury Botler’s reports and protect this corruption” after it had sent two reports to the CBSA.

As for Dutt, she told MPs that in December 2022 her emails were hacked and “every record of an email that Kristian Firth sent me was mysteriously deleted.”

She said that this came at the same time CBSA president Erin O’Gorman had said she was going to consider whether to send the reports to the RCMP.

Dutt said that they “watched and waited patiently for someone to do the right thing,” to “act on our reports.”

“But instead, we were heartbroken as they lied. They lied to us. They lied to you at OGGO, they lied to Parliament, and they lied to Canadian taxpayers,” she added.

So-called ‘ghost contracting’ exposed

Morv was asked by Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Stephanie Kusie to describe what so-called “ghost contracting” was when it concerned the development of the ArriveCAN app.

According to Morv, ghost contracting could have been how GC Strategies, a company with only two employees, ended up with $11.2 to help develop the travel app.

In essence, “ghost contracting” is a middleman added to the mix but does not have any sort of legal trace back to the government. The companies do no work, but they make a “significant amount of commission,” Morv said.

Morv said that he is not sure Dalion or Coradix, who received a combined $4.3 million to help develop the app, fit the “ghost contracting” definition; they had hired ghost contractors to do the actual work.

CPC MP Garnett Genuis said that the whole evolving ArriveCAN scandal showed a “horrific system of government corruption” that went beyond the travel app.

He told Morv, “You’re describing a system in which government contracts go to preferred contractors, they claim to subcontract to others, who they claim do the work and they provide reports on this.”

He added, “But those subcontractors might not be doing the work. They might not know they’re being named. They might not even exist in some cases. And then this system allows those initial contractors to overbill taxpayers. Is what’s going on here?”

Morv said, “In this case, the system encouraged the contractors to actually do this. That is correct.”

When the Trudeau government introduced the ArriveCAN app, they made sure of quick compliance by saying at the time, “If you don’t submit your travel information and proof of vaccination using ArriveCAN, you could be fined $5,000.”

Top constitutional lawyers have said ArriveCAN violates an individual’s constitutional rights and that people’s civil liberties on paper have been rendered “meaningless effectively in the real world” because of COVID.

Eventually, in the fall of 2021, the Trudeau government banned the vaccine free from traveling by air, rail, or sea 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 regarding travel, including masking on planes and trains, COVID testing, and allowing vaccine-free Canadians to no longer be subject to mandatory quarantine.

More than 700 vaccine-free Canadians negatively affected by federal COVID jab dictates have banded together to file a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Trudeau’s federal government.

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2025 Federal Election

Mark Carney refuses to clarify 2022 remarks accusing the Freedom Convoy of ‘sedition’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Mark Carney described the Freedom Convoy as an act of ‘sedition’ and advocated for the government to use its power to crush the non-violent protest movement.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney refused to elaborate on comments he made in 2022 referring to the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protest as an act of “sedition” and advocating for the government to put an end to the movement.

“Well, look, I haven’t been a politician,” Carney said when a reporter in Windsor, Ontario, where a Freedom Convoy-linked border blockade took place in 2022, asked, “What do you say to Canadians who lost trust in the Liberal government back then and do not have trust in you now?”

“I became a politician a little more than two months ago, two and a half months ago,” he said. “I came in because I thought this country needed big change. We needed big change in the economy.”

Carney’s lack of an answer seems to be in stark contrast to the strong opinion he voiced in a February 7, 2022, column published in the Globe & Mail at the time of the convoy titled, “It’s Time To End The Sedition In Ottawa.”

In that piece, Carney wrote that the Freedom Convoy was a movement of “sedition,” adding, “That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

Carney went on to claim in the piece that if “left unchecked” by government authorities, the Freedom Convoy would “achieve” its “goal of undermining our democracy.”

Carney even targeted “[a]nyone sending money to the Convoy,” accusing them of “funding sedition.”

Internal emails from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) eventually showed that his definition of sedition were not in conformity with the definition under Canada’s Criminal Code, which explicitly lists the “use of force” as a necessary aspect of sedition.

“The key bit is ‘use of force,’” one RCMP officer noted in the emails. “I’m all about a resolution to this and a forceful one with us victorious but, from the facts on the ground, I don’t know we’re there except in a small number of cases.”

The reality is that the Freedom Convoy was a peaceful event of public protest against COVID mandates, and not one protestor was charged with sedition. However, the Liberal government, then under Justin Trudeau, did take an approach similar to the one advocated for by Carney, invoking the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters. Since then, a federal judge has ruled that such action was “not justified.”

Despite this, the two most prominent leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, still face a possible 10-year prison sentence for their role in the non-violent assembly. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.

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COVID-19

17-year-old died after taking COVID shot, but Ontario judge denies his family’s liability claim

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

An Ontario judge dismissed a liability claim from a family of a high schooler who died weeks after taking the COVID shot.

According to a published report on March 26 by Blacklock’s Reporter, Ontario Superior Court Justice Sandra Antoniani ruled that the Department of Health had no “duty of care” to a Canadian teenager who died after receiving a COVID vaccine.

“The plaintiff’s tragedy is real, but there is no private law duty of care made out,” Antoniani said.

“There is no private law duty of care to individual members of the public injured by government core policy decisions in the handling of health emergencies which impact the general population,” she continued.

In September 2021, 17-year-old Sean Hartman of Beeton, Ontario, passed away just three weeks after receiving a Pfizer-BioNtech COVID shot.

After his death, his family questioned if health officials had warned Canadians “that a possible side effect of receiving a Covid-19 vaccine was death.” The family took this petition to court but has been denied a hearing.

Antoniani alleged that “the defendants’ actions were aimed at mitigating the health impact of a global pandemic on the Canadian public. The defendants deemed that urgent action was necessary.”

“Imposition of a private duty of care would have a negative impact on the ability of the defendants to prioritize the interests of the entire public, with the distraction of fear over the possibility of harm to individual members of the public, and the risk of litigation and unlimited liability,” she ruled.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Dan Hartman, Sean’s father, filed a $35.6 million lawsuit against Pfizer after his son’s death.

However, only 103 claims of 1,859 have been approved to date, “where it has been determined by the Medical Review Board that there is a probable link between the injury and the vaccine, and that the injury is serious and permanent.”

Thus far, VISP has paid over $6 million to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled.

According to studies, post-vaccination heart conditions such as myocarditis are well documented in those, especially young males who have received the Pfizer jab.

Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters.

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