Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

COVID-19

Trudeau official threatened with contempt for evasive answers over scandal-ridden ArriveCAN app

Published

5 months ago

5 minute read

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

During a parliamentary investigation into the misuse of funds used to create the federal government’s controversial COVID-era 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.  

On November 14, Minh Doan, Canada’s chief federal technology officer, testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) regarding his connection with the ArriveCAN travel app. In cross-examination, Doan “struggled to give direct answers to simple questions,” said Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Kelly McCauley, who serves as the committee chair. 

“Refusal to answer questions or failure to reply may result in a charge of contempt,” stressed McCauley, before adding, “This has been repeated to you several times.” 

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. 

Indeed, recently, LifeSiteNews 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.

McCauley added that Doan had been asked a lot of “direct questions.” 

“I normally don’t do this but there have been very specific questions and we’d like very specific answers. Taxpayers deserve that. Canadians deserve that. Parliament deserves that,” he said. 

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.

 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. 

Witnesses named Doan as person who approved contract to GC Strategies  

Witnesses have named Doan as the manager who hired GC Strategies, which was awarded an $8.9 million contract without any counter tenders offered. GC Strategies was operated by a two-man team out of a home in Woodlawn, Ontario.  

According to evidence relayed to the public by Blacklock’s Reporter, GC Strategies was shown to have taken home a commission worth close to 30 percent, or $2.7 million. The company then assigned all the work to subcontractors.  

Doan, for his part, justified his dealings with the “relatively small” company by saying “[w]e followed the rules. No rules were broken as far as I’m concerned.” 

According to an assistant deputy health minister, it was Doan himself who had decided to hire GC Strategies. 

He has denied this, however, saying, “I still do not know who picked up the phone and asked them to solicit a bid in the first place.”  

“I made a technical and strategic decision which led to GC Strategies,” he said, adding that, “I am accountable for that decision. I am responsible for that decision.” 

Doan also gave non-answers to CPC MP Garnett Genuis when asked when he first heard of GC Strategies. According to Doan, he didn’t “become aware of the existence of GC Strategies until well into the pandemic.” 

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. 

Related Topics:

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

More from this author
conflict / 13 mins ago

Immigration Experts Warn Possible Biden Plan To Import Gazan Refugees Would Be ‘National Security Disaster’

Addictions / 5 hours ago

Canada’s ‘safer supply’ patients are receiving staggering amounts of narcotics

Alberta / 5 hours ago

Game changer: Trans Mountain pipeline expansion complete and starting to flow Canada’s oil to the world

Brownstone Institute

The Predictable Wastes of Covid Relief

Published on May 5, 2024

By

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Daniel NuccioDANIEL NUCCIO  

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

  • Daniel Nuccio
    Daniel Nuccio

    Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.

Continue Reading

COVID-19

Canada’s COVID vaccine injury program has paid out just 6% of claims so far

Published on May 1, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

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.” 

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

Continue Reading

Trending

X