OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – The husband of Canadian Minister of Defence Anita Anand is a director of a COVID testing company that appears to have gained financially during the pandemic in the form of million-dollar government contracts.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Anand did not disclose under the Conflicts of Interest Act that her husband, John Knowlton, is a director of LifeLabs, which is a large contractor for the government’s COVID testing programs.
Knowlton is also a senior managing director with Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, a pension fund investor, which in turn is the indirect owner of LifeLabs.
Before the COVID crisis hit, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, LifeLabs received few federal contracts. In 2019, it only received $134,413 from the feds.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, LifeLabs was just awarded millions of dollars’ worth of contracts for COVID testing.
Indeed, Canadian Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos confirmed this last Friday while announcing an increase in virus testing capacity.
“In order to further increase our capacity quickly, we have awarded contracts to private companies providing us with additional testing and processing services. These companies include Switch Health, LifeLabs and Dynacare,” Duclos noted.
Daniel Minden, Anand’s press secretary, claims the minister “fulfilled her disclosure obligations to the Ethics Commissioner” and that she has not “signed any contracts with this entity or its subsidiaries.”
LifeLabs bills itself as a “Canadian-owned company serving the healthcare needs of Canadians for more than 50 years,” performing over 112 million laboratory tests each year.
As for Anand, she was elected an MP and then appointed Public Works Ministers in the fall of 2019.
LifeLabs was recently awarded $111 million for testing services in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon.
The federal government also awarded millions for COVID testing to two other companies, $80 million to Dynacare for Quebec and Manitoba, and $440 million to Switch Health for testing in Alberta, Atlantic Canada, and Ontario.
In June 2020, LifeLabs was awarded a $66,307,424 contract for COVID testing. In August, the company received an additional $1.9 million contract.
According to Minden, however, Anand was not involved in any of the contacts despite her husband’s role with LifeLabs.
Blacklock’s Reporter said that Anand’s filings with the ethics commissioner do not disclose any Declaration of Recusal concerning her and LifeLabs.
As for the COVID PCR tests that LifeLabs has been contracted to conduct, the accuracy of them “may vary by time of day,” according to a Vanderbilt University study.
Also, last year, a paper published in the BMJ reported that the PCR throat swab tests might only have a 32 percent sensitivity rate, with nasal swabs having only 63 percent accuracy.
Since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in 2015, the Liberal Party has been caught in many scandals, such as the WE Charity corruption scandal, the SNC-Lavalin affair, and the sacking of high profile female MPs.
Indeed, one of Trudeau’s newest MPs, George Chahal for Calgary-Skyview, was caught red-handed in September pilfering his conservative opponent’s flyers from someone’s porch during the fall election campaign.
Despite this, he might only get a slap on the wrist for his unethical actions.
But Chahal’s scandal escalated after Conservative Party of Canada MP John Brassard claimed that Chahal was advising people on how to commit fraud by applying for COVID relief money illegally. Chahal later denied this was true.
Trudeau has also been heavy-handed when it comes to COVID rules, such as banning democratically elected MPs and staff who have not had COVID jabs from accessing the nation’s center of democracy, the House of Commons.
Effective from December 1, the federal government under Trudeau enacted a policy banning Canadians over age 12 who have chosen not to get the abortion-tainted COVID jabs from traveling by air, sea, or train.
Those with the jabs will have to use Canada’s vaccine passport or their provincial system to prove they have had the still-experimental injections.
In response to Trudeau’s new rule barring the un-jabbed from travel by air, train, or sea, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) said it will be looking to legally challenge “Transport Canada’s Ministerial Order 47 in Federal Court.”