Government Operations Committee on Feb. 28th, 2024

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That's wonderful. Thank you very much.

Now we have Mr. Genuis and then Mr. Sousa.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I am fundamentally perplexed about the role that your department is supposed to be playing. If the decisions are ultimately made by the department—in this case, the CBSA—and if you provide a recommendation to not proceed with a procurement but the department does it anyway.... If you are a minister, the minister who's supposed to be responsible for all this, and you are not being briefed on a core file....

I guess I'm just trying to understand what you do. What value are you adding, as a department, to the Government of Canada?

[Arianne Reza]

Thank you very much for the question.

Again, I'm going to go back to the fact that we focus on the procurement process. The client department has the responsibility to provide the value, to be able to judge whether or not they got value for money for the procurement. In this case, we heard from the AG very clearly that it was not something doable.

PSPC's remit is to ensure best value in the procurement process and to ensure that the tools are the right tools for the procurement that is being tendered. In this case, as you can see, it was not well able to provide that condition for best value, and we have to temper it by the pandemic and the various elements that were going on there.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, ma'am.

I understood you to say that you're focused on the procurement process. Of course, there are academics and Ph.D. students who focus on the procurement process as well, insofar as they study how it works. Your job as a government department, I think, is not only to focus on the procurement process but also to exercise some power or impact over that process—that is, to actually shape decisions.

If you're not doing that, if things can go so far awry and you're not exercising power over those decisions, and you're not briefing the minister who is supposed to be responsible, then I guess I'll ask the question again. What value are you adding to the process? You're focusing on it, but what are you doing?

[Arianne Reza]

We're focusing on it to try to manage and mitigate risk, to ensure best value for Canadians, to drive down the cost to procurement and to seek efficiencies. There are shared responsibilities. If you come as a department and say, “We want to procure X or Y”, we provide that overview of how best to procure that in a way that is efficient for Canadians.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

In the case of ArriveCAN, your recommendation was not followed, and you're not able to tell us who was responsible, either on your side or in the case of the other department. If, theoretically, you're supposed to exercise some shared responsibility, you didn't in this case. Is that right?

[Arianne Reza]

Thank you very much for the question.

The authority to enter into a contract for the Government of Canada rests with the contracting authority. In this case, it was PSPC. We actually have the documentation of who provided the authority to enter the contract and who signed the contracts. What has been very difficult is understanding the sole-source choice of GC Strategies and the compelling sole-source justification provided by CBSA. There is material on file and, again, it is a shared responsibility.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

However, they are the ones who made the decision. You're saying you don't know how or why they made the decision. Would you acknowledge, at least in this case, that your department did nothing or added no value? What's the minister supposed to be doing in the process?

[Arianne Reza]

Thank you very much.

I will not acknowledge that. I will describe, once again, what we've done. We ensured that the firm they chose was a firm that was eligible and that had been pre-qualified on a competitive tool that has evaluation criteria that is published. We ensured that the price—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

If GC Strategies could have been on that pre-qualified list, we clearly have a broken system. You ensured narrow compliance with their being on a list. You identified that they shouldn't be given the contract, and they were given the contract anyway. How many people work at the department, and what would you say to taxpayers who just don't understand the point of all this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Give a brief answer, please.

[Arianne Reza]

I would say that PSPC, during the pandemic, did $20 billion of procurement on behalf of Canadians for PPE, for medical equipment and for procurement of vaccines. It kept many different departments up and running. We've had several clean audits from the Auditor General, and the value that was provided was on the procurement process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks very much.

Next is Mr. Sousa, please, to wrap up today.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much, deputy, for being here, and to the assistant deputy ministers.

I'm sorry we haven't had a chance to really talk, but in this case, if time permits, we may.

Deputy, just to be clear, GC Strategies, at the time of the pandemic, was on a pre-approved list, meaning that they had already proven themselves in past occasions as an authorized supplier. Is that correct?

[Arianne Reza]

That is correct, and they were in good standing at the time.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Did the previous government...? I believe Pierre Poilievre also authorized GC Strategies in previous contracts. Is that correct...or the principals of GC Strategies?

[Arianne Reza]

Their existence predates 2015.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Then it was there prior, and they were on a list as a consequence at that period of time.

Can you explain to me how many contracts the government does on an annual basis?

[Arianne Reza]

How many contracts the government does?

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Yes, how many submissions come before you?

[Arianne Reza]

I think there are approximately 100,000 transactions that are contracts, amendments and supply arrangements that the government does, valuing about $34 billion. PSPC does the vast volume, but I think it's very important to underscore to this committee that we only do about 7% of the actual volume of contract documentation. There is broad—

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Then there is work being done by PSPC, notwithstanding some of the comments made by my colleagues on the other side. I just want to verify that you do quite a bit of advising and quite a bit of work.

In regard to that, there's been this confusion over the cost of ArriveCAN and rightly so, because the Auditor General has cited that they had a very difficult time trying to address what it entailed. Can you explain to me how this project would have only cost $80,000?

[Arianne Reza]

My first explanation is that, here at PSPC, we did not contract for anything for $80,000. We provided contracts for staff augmentation, so right off the bat in April, if we were signing a contract for $2.5 million or $2.35 million, that money, or that contract, was being used within CBSA to cross many different business lines.

As the Auditor General noted herself, in her report she estimated the cost as a subcost of the contracts that we put in place. We have no visibility on that.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

There was also a lot of discussion after the ombudsman's report about this notion of “bait and switch”. Can you explain to this committee how this process works and what that means?