COVID-19
Tech entrepreneurs allege corruption, misuse of taxpayer funds in development of Canadian travel app
From LifeSiteNews
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.
Canada Auditor General Karen Hogan announced an investigation of the ArriveCan app last November after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.
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.
COVID-19
Trump DOJ seeks to quash Pfizer whistleblower’s lawsuit over COVID shots
From LifeSiteNews
The Justice Department attorney did not mention the Trump FDA’s recent admission linking the COVID shots to at least 10 child deaths so far.
The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to dismiss a whistleblower case against Pfizer over its COVID-19 shots, even as the Trump Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is beginning to admit their culpability in children’ s deaths.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 the BMJ published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 shot.
The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”
According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.
Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial. Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. That case has been ongoing ever since.
Last August, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale dismissed most of Jackson’s claims with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. Jackson challenged the decision, but the Trump DOJ has argued in court to uphold it, Just the News reports, with DOJ attorney Nicole Smith arguing that the case concerns preserving the government’s unfettered power to dismiss whistleblower cases.
The rationale echoes a recurring trend in DOJ strategy that Politico described in May as “preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions,” even in cases that involve “backing policies favored by Democrats.”
Jackson’s attorney Warner Mendenhall responded that the administration “really sort of made our case for us” in effectively admitting that DOJ is taking the Fair Claims Act’s “good cause” standard for state intervention to mean “mere desire to dismiss,” which infringes on his client’s “First Amendment right to access the courts, to vindicate what she learned.”
Mendenhall added that in a refiled case, Jackson “may be able to bring a very different case along the same lines, but with the additional information” to prove fraud, whereas rejection would send the message that “if fraud involves government complicity, don’t bother reporting it.”
That additional information would presumably include the FDA’s recent admission that at least 10 children the agency has reviewed so far “died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination.”
“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” admitted FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad in a recent leaked email. “It is horrifying to consider that the U.S. vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”
The COVID shots have been highly controversial ever since the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative prepared and released them in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a large body of evidence has steadily accumulated over the past five years indicating that the COVID jabs failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own.
Ever since, many have intently watched and hotly debated what President Donald Trump would do about the situation upon his return to office. Though he never backed mandates like former President Joe Biden did, for years Trump refused to disavow the shots to the chagrin of his base, seeing Operation Warp Speed as one of his crowning achievements. At the same time, during his latest run he embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its suspicion of the medical establishment more broadly.
So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current jabs optional but not supporting work to develop successors.
In a July interview, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.
COVID-19
Canadian Health Department funds study to determine effects of COVID lockdowns on children
From LifeSiteNews
The commissioned study will assess the impact on kids’ mental well-being of COVID lockdowns and ‘remote’ school classes that banned outdoor play and in-person learning.
Canada’s Department of Health has commissioned research to study the impact of outdoor play on kids’ mental well-being in light of COVID lockdowns and “remote” school classes that, for a time, banned outdoor play and in-person learning throughout most of the nation.
In a notice to consultants titled “Systematic Literature Reviews And Meta Analyses Supporting Two Projects On Children’s Health And Covid-19,” the Department of Health admitted that “Exposure to green space has been consistently associated with protective effects on children’s physical and mental health.”
A final report, which is due in 2026, will provide “Health Canada with a comprehensive assessment of current evidence, identify key knowledge gaps and inform surveillance and policy planning for future pandemics and other public health emergencies.”
Bruce Squires, president of McMaster Children’s Hospital of Hamilton, Ontario, noted in 2022 that “Canada’s children and youth have borne the brunt” of COVID lockdowns.
From about March 2020 to mid-2022, most of Canada was under various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, including mask mandates, at the local, provincial, and federal levels. Schools were shut down, parks were closed, and most kids’ sports were cancelled.
Mandatory facemask polices were common in Canada and all over the world for years during the COVID crisis despite over 170 studies showing they were not effective in stopping the spread of COVID and were, in fact, harmful, especially to children.
In October 2021, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced unprecedented COVID-19 jab mandates for all federal workers and those in the transportation sector, saying the un-jabbed would no longer be able to travel by air, boat, or train, both domestically and internationally.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, a new report released by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) raised alarm bells over the “harms caused” by COVID-19 lockdowns and injections imposed by various levels of government as well as a rise in unexplained deaths and bloated COVID-19 death statistics.
Indeed, a recent study showed that COVID masking policies left children less able to differentiate people’s emotions behind facial expressions.
COVID vaccine mandates and lockdowns, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society.
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