COVID-19
“Bring in the Auditors” Shadow Finance Minister says billions are unaccounted for
From Conservative Party of Canada
Trudeau’s accountability equation:
Double the spending + half the audits = a quarter of the accountability.
Bring in the Auditors
Conservative Shadow Minister for Finance, Pierre Poilievre, and Conservative Shadow Minister for the Treasury Board, Tim Uppal, held a press conference to call on the Trudeau Liberals to provide the Auditor General’s Office with the necessary funding to audit the government’s unprecedented spending.
As Canada’s top spending watchdog, the Auditor General is a cornerstone of our parliamentary democracy. Shamefully, the Liberal government has flagrantly disregarded this fact over the past five years. Ten years ago, the Auditor General’s Office was conducting 27 performance audits a year. At its current funding levels, the Auditor General can only complete 14 performance audits a year.
In order to underscore the necessity of funding the Auditor General, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre will move the following motion at the Standing Committee of Finance:
That the Standing Committee on Finance call on the Auditor General of Canada to audit all federal programs associated with Canada’s COVID-19 response and to complete all previously-scheduled audits and all audits requested by the House; and call on the government to provide the Office of the Auditor General all the funding it needs to carry out these audits and any other work it deems appropriate.
“Over the last ten years the size of government has doubled, and the number of audits has gone down by half. Massive Liberal spending programs lack basic accountability and transparency, such as their $180 billion infrastructure program. The government has spent billions on projects to date, yet they cannot produce a full list of projects that have received money. In fact, there are roughly 20,000 projects that are not accounted for. This complete disregard of taxpayer money is troubling. It’s time to bring in the auditors,” said MP Pierre Poilievre.
“The Liberals have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending during the pandemic but are refusing to provide an economic update or to be transparent with Canadians,” said MP Tim Uppal. “In a crisis, oversight is more important than ever. But the Auditor General doesn’t have enough funding to conduct audits of government programs. Taxpayers deserve to know how the government is spending their money.”
From the Brownstone Institute
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities
If you ever had the vague sense that Covid relief funding worked in a manner akin to US aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.
First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting Covid unemployment benefits from the US government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.
Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of Covid funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus – or, more accurately, the lockdowns.
One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of Covid cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)
Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using Covid relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project reported on how large sums of Covid money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of Covid or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their Covid cooties.
But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.
Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs – cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles – came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.
Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their Covid money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.
Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of Covid and allow schools to reopen safely.
Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.
Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading – as do the other surveillance tools bought with Covid cash.
Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.
In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-Covid America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.
Author
From LifeSiteNews
Data from Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program shows that to date, only 138 of the 2,233 claims have been approved by a medical board for a payout.
Canada’s program for those injured by the COVID vaccines, which the federal government still insists are safe, has only paid out 6 percent of the claims made.
A look at the data from the nation’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) shows that to date, only 138 of the 2,233 claims made to the program have been approved by a medical board for payout.
Some 2,069 claims have had an “administrative review completed” with 1,825 being deemed “admissible,” but remain in the process of “being depersonalized and prepared to move forward to a preliminary medical review.” Some 620 claims have been assessed by the Medical Review Board but are still under review.
Total payouts so far stand around $11.2 million, with the number of people filing claims to the program growing steadily.
LifeSiteNews recently reported that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recently tabled 2024 budget earmarked an extra $36 million for the program.
Some people who were successful in getting payouts from VISP have said that the compensation awarded was insufficient considering the injuries sustained from the COVID shots.
As reported by LifeSiteNews last year, 42-year-old Ross Wightman from British Columbia launched a lawsuit against AstraZeneca, the federal government of Canada, the government of his province, and the pharmacy at which he was injected after receiving what he considers inadequate compensation from VISP.
He was one of the first citizens in Canada to receive federal financial compensation due to a COVID vaccine injury under VISP. Wightman received the AstraZeneca shot in April 2021 and shortly after became totally paralyzed. He was subsequently diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Whitman was given a one-time payout of $250,000 and about $90,000 per year in income replacement, but noted, as per a recent True North report, that he does not even know if those dollar amounts “would ease the pain.”
“Given the extent of the permanent life-changing injuries, a couple hundred thousand dollars isn’t much, that’s for sure,” he said.
All Canadian provinces except Quebec are covered by VISP, who has its own vaccine compensation program that also appears to be slow at paying out to applicants.
Yesterday, LifeSiteNews reported about a 30-year-old Quebec man who developed a severe skin condition after taking Moderna’s mRNA experimental COVID-19 shot. He still has not heard anything from the provincial government regarding compensation through its vaccine injury program despite the debilitating nature of his condition.
Despite the need for a federal program to address those injured by the vaccines once mandated by the Trudeau government, Health Canada still says “[I]t’s safe to receive a COVID-19 vaccine following infection with the virus that causes COVID-19. Vaccination is very important, even if you’ve had COVID-19.”
The federal government is also continuing to purchase COVID jabs despite the fact the government’s own data shows that most Canadians are flat-out refusing a COVID booster injection.
Indeed, records show the federal government has spent approximately $9.9 million on social media advertising to promote the
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