Connect with us

COVID-19

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

Published

9 minute read

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.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

COVID-19

5 Stories the Media Buried This Week

Published on

The Vigilant Fox

#5 – Anthony Fauci warns: “The next outbreak will be of a respiratory disease that’s easily transmissible, that has a significant degree of morbidity and mortality.”

“What is likely to happen,” Fauci says, “is the emergence of another respiratory disease.”

“It may be another coronavirus, because we know that coronaviruses, really, mostly in bats, have the capability of binding to receptors that are in humans.”

“It could be another flu,” Fauci continued. “We’re dealing with H5N1 now, which is bird flu, which has taken the somewhat disturbing step of infecting mammals, namely cows and cats and other mammals, which means it’s adapting itself more to a human.”

“So my concern, Walter, is that whenever that happens, the next outbreak will be of a respiratory disease that’s easily transmissible, that has a significant degree of morbidity and mortality,” Fauci said.

When asked if the cuts at HHS and “our attitude towards science” are making the situation “a little bit more dangerous,” Fauci replied, “Oh, absolutely!”

VIDEO: @TheChiefNerd

 

#4 – Dr. Oz drops bombshells on the massive waste, fraud, and abuse bleeding Medicare and Medicaid.

Oz explained that people are unknowingly signed up for coverage, illegal schemes are funneling taxpayer dollars to those who aren’t eligible, and the same patient can be billed in multiple states with no federal oversight catching it.

It also turns out that 230,000 Americans were enrolled in Obamacare plans without even knowing it.

#3 – Tucker Carlson is horrified to learn that over 9 million children have already received the COVID shot—and that the injections are still happening.

His reaction at the end of this clip says it all.

VIDEO: @McCulloughFund

While you’re here, don’t forget to subscribe to get this top 10 list emailed to you each week.

 

#2 – Jenny McCarty reveals chilling encounter after speaking out on vaccine issue.

• After going public about her son’s autism and the vaccine link, Jenny McCarthy received a private visit from a man with a warning.

• He claimed to work for a top-level PR firm and said he was approached by a government agency.

• His job? To create a campaign to discredit her and label her “anti-vaccine.”

• He said he turned down the offer—because his own child had gone through the same thing.

•The man warned her that they would find someone else to do it and use the media to come after her hard.

• McCarthy was stunned and asked him to repeat everything—she said she had chills all over her body.

• When she asked why they’d attack her despite her not being anti-vaccine, he replied, “Doesn’t matter.”

• According to him, they had the media on their side and would do whatever it took to bury her message.

#1 – Billionaire Democrat donor turned DOGE ally drops bombshell and says Biden’s border policies handed $13–15 billion a year to human traffickers—and helped import future Democratic voters.

“We gave $13 to $15 billion a year to human traffickers. That’s what this system did,” Antonio Gracias lamented.

Gracias’ team combed through voter rolls in four states and uncovered thousands of non-citizens not only registered to vote, but in many cases, actually voted.

“We looked at the voter rolls in four states, and we found thousands of these people [non-citizens] on the voter rolls, and we found many of those people had voted. In one state in particular, well over a thousand voted.”

His conclusion?

“I think this [Biden’s border policy] was a move to import voters.”

VIDEO: @KanekoaTheGreat

Share


Thanks for reading! This weekly roundup takes time and care to put together—and I do my best to make it your go-to source for the stories that matter most but rarely get the attention they deserve.

If you like my work and want to support me and my family and help keep this page going strong, the most powerful thing you can do is sign up for the email list and become a paid subscriber.

Your monthly subscription goes further than you think. Thank you so much for your support.

Continue Reading

COVID-19

Maxime Bernier slams Freedom Convoy leaders’ guilty verdict, calls Canada’s justice system ‘corrupt’

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The leader of the People’s Party of Canada says Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were victims of a ‘political witch hunt.’

The leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) ripped Thursday’s federal court ruling that found Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber guilty of mischief, saying the court siding with the government amounted to a “political witch hunt.”

“It is disheartening to learn that two of the heroes of the Freedom Convoy, @LichTamara and @ChrisBarber1975, have been found guilty of mischief in the longest and one of the costliest trials in Canadian history,” Maxime Bernier wrote Thursday on X.

“This clearly was a political witch hunt.”

Bernier added that in his view the reality is that Canada’s justice system is “corrupt.”

“Trudeau and his ministers who illegally invoked the Emergencies Act and violated basic rights will go unpunished,” he noted.

“Our justice system is corrupt to the bones.”

On Thursday, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the mischief trial, delivered her verdict, finding both Lich and Barber guilty of mischief.

Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.

Lich and Barber both faced six charges each, those being charges of mischief, obstruction, intimidation, and counseling others to commit mischief and intimidation. After the court reconvened Thursday afternoon, Lich was acquitted of four of her six charges, with the fifth charge, counseling to commit mischief, being stayed by the judge.

As for sentencing, the court will reconvene on April 16 at 1:30 p.m. EST, at which time it will say when a date and time for sentencing will be held.

Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.

The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.

Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.

Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.

Continue Reading

Trending

X