Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, Ms. Murray. Thank you for being with us today.
Shared Services Canada has an enormous job ahead of it to modernize the network. It has to think in terms of not only current needs, but also needs over the next ten years, and this calls for taking a very broad, very innovative and very creative view. The 2018 budget allocated $340 million per year to update information technologies, or IT. The 2021 budget adds $100 million to that amount, about $200 million of which is reserved for updating and modernizing the network. Of that $200 million, approximately $160 million has been awarded, untendered, to Cisco or one of its resellers, which ultimately amounts to the same thing.
Why has Cisco received favoured treatment, almost always by a non-competitive process?