The House of Commons public accounts committee has voted to call on the government to ban federal employees from taking on contract work from governmental departments. The vote comes as the committee’s investigation into ArriveCan continues.
“It should be disallowed, that you have somebody making money both as a government employee and an external contractor,” said Conservative MP Garnett Genuis at the committee meeting on March 6, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.
Liberal MPs on the committee opposed the motion, which asked the federal government to “prohibit any government employee from simultaneously working as an external contractor.”
The motion follows revelations that Dalian Enterprises CEO David Yeo, whose company worked on the $59.5 million ArriveCan application, was also a longtime civilian employee with the Department of National Defence. Dalian received $8.1 million in contracts to work on ArriveCan.
“Clearly that’s a bit of a problem,” said Mr. Genuis. “It is either allowed or it is not allowed. In fairness to Mr. Yeo it was on his LinkedIn profile so it was kind of hiding in plain sight.”
Following the revelations, Public Services and Procurement Canada recently announced it had suspended Dalian from participating in procurement opportunities.
Liberal MPs voted against the motion, with MP Brenda Shanahan calling it a “stunt,” and saying she did not believe it was something MPs could settle “in a prescriptive motion of this kind.”
Auditor General Karen Hogan, who released her scathing report on the ArriveCan application last month, said there are “rules that already exist around public servants needing to disclose whether they have other employment income sources.”
“That disclosure is meant to ensure there isn’t a conflict of interest,“ Ms. Hogan said, adding that the issue was that “rules need to be enforced.”
The current “Values And Ethics Code For The Public Sector” mandates that federal employees take “all possible steps to prevent and resolve any real, apparent or potential conflicts of interest” but does not impose a blanket ban on insider contracting, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
Comptroller General Roch Huppé told the public accounts committee there was no official count on the number of federal contractors working on the federal payroll.
“Government-wide, I don’t have that information,” testified Mr. Huppé. He indicated he would provide committee with a breakdown of the official numbers.
The total costs of 428,000 federal employees’ salaries and benefits totalled a record $67 billion last year, according to a February 22 Budget Office report. Federal agencies also spent $16.7 billion a year on consultants, by official estimate.
Conservative MP Michael Barrett said it “strains the bounds of public confidence when the government says, ‘Yes, we have hired many orders of magnitude more public servants than we ever had but we don’t have the capabilities to do the work we need to do so we are going to outsource that work, and we are going to outsource it to the tune of millions of dollars to people who already work for the federal government.’”
During his testimony at the government operations committee last October, Mr. Yeo said that as the descendant of a First Nations chief he was instrumental in promoting indigenous contracting.
“In 2003 I was asked to participate in the creation of the Government of Canada’s policy for the procurement strategy for aboriginal business,” he said. Mr. Yeo did not mention he was also a federal employee at the time.
