Thank you.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me today to discuss an issue central to the integrity of federal procurement oversight, that being the ongoing underfunding of my office.
As you know, OPO, the Office of the Procurement Ombud, is mandated to ensure fairness, openness and transparency in federal procurement. However, without the necessary resources, effectively fulfilling this mission has become nearly impossible, ultimately jeopardizing the trust Canadian taxpayers have in federal procurement.
Since the office's creation in 2008, our budget of $4.1 million has essentially remained static. It has not been adjusted to reflect increased costs, nor has it accounted for the growing volume and complexity of the work that we handle.
Despite the commitment in the last federal budget to uphold and enforce the highest standards of federal procurement and ensure sound stewardship of public funds, our budget saw no increase. In fact, there have been approximately $350,000 in reductions to our budget over the years as part of wider government cutbacks.
While I understand the government's need to find efficiencies across many departments, now is a crucial moment to invest in an office that oversees a $37-billion procurement system.
Underfunding our office is akin to failing to perform basic maintenance on a vehicle, resulting in a breakdown. My office was built to handle the necessary repairs to keep the vehicle running, but unfortunately, we do not have the necessary resources to perform this essential function. With the requested increase to our budget, we wouldn't just perform the routine maintenance necessary to keep the vehicle on the road, but we'd also have the insight and capacity to support selecting the new vehicle. As outlined in my annual report, the time has come. It's time to replace the vehicle. It's time for action now.
In recent years our office has seen an overall increase in cases—contract award complaints, contract administration complaints, requests for mediation services, and ad hoc procurement practice reviews, such as WE Charity, ArriveCAN, McKinsey, bait and switch and, just recently, a potential review of indigenous procurement.
These are all vital areas of procurement that require analysis, and simply put, we are inadequately funded to properly do this.
Additionally, OPO has assumed the workload of the recently dissolved business dispute management program at PSPC, which also provided a recourse mechanism for suppliers in contract disputes.
I want to share with you how this funding shortfall has impacted my office's ability to effectively deliver on our legislative mandate. If left unaddressed, it will continue to have a huge impact on Canadian taxpayers, suppliers and the federal buying community.
To undertake the ad hoc reviews I just mentioned, we had to obtain one-time funding from PSPC, which solved some of the problems but also created new ones. This funding prohibited our office from hiring permanent resources and instead created a patchwork solution. We were forced to hire temporary staff who did not have the experience or time to lead these reviews. Under the one-time funding, we refused to hire consultants to conduct the reviews for many of the reasons you saw in ArriveCAN and McKinsey, as well as the need to avoid conflicts of interest. We need permanent funding that will enable us to hire permanent resources with the skills and experience to lead these important, complex procurement reviews.
Other serious impacts of our funding shortfall include delays in launching our procurement practice follow-up reviews, which are crucial for assessing whether departments have implemented our recommendations. There is no point in conducting systemic reviews and making recommendations for improvement if we don't follow up to ensure the actions have been taken to correct the deficiencies. Results from our follow-up reviews are reported publicly and hold the departments and agencies accountable for addressing problems that we identified in our initial review.
Other serious impacts of our funding shortfall include delays in launching our knowledge-deepening and knowledge-sharing research studies, which provide guidance to procurement officials and suppliers and are essential in establishing the “reasonable grounds” required by legislation to launch our systemic reviews.
The shortfall also gives us limited ability to conduct outreach activities across Canada to ensure that the Canadian businesses we were created to help know that we exist and how we can help them, particularly small and medium-sized businesses.
The shortfall also gives us limited ability to proactively launch procurement practice reviews in important areas such as construction contract administration, defence procurement, indigenous procurement and others that would have a significant impact on procurement.
We have the potential to proactively conduct reviews and make recommendations that aim to improve federal procurement before costly problems materialize. I will stop there, but the list goes on.
Our office has recently put forward our budget request for a third time because the previous two had been declined. We have always acted in a fiscally prudent manner and have requested funds when we knew we no longer had the resources needed to deliver our services. We took a professional approach to be proactive before the situation became critical, but unfortunately we have now entered that crisis point where difficult decisions will need to be taken and critical services will be cut.
In our most recent budget—
