Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mollie.
The Government of Canada has approximately 400,000 contracts and amendments each year. I would say, anecdotally, that the majority of them are simple and straightforward requirements where I would expect the quoted price matched the final contract value.
There are a number of complex procurements that are conducted by the Government of Canada every year. These procurements are complex in their nature. Often the deliverables or the final outcome is uncertain and there is an evolution in collaboration with the contractor to achieve a result. It is difficult to then assess whether the increase in contract value is the result of the activities that are engaged in with the contractor to ultimately solve a problem, or whether it is an increase from the originally estimated quote.
As Mollie mentioned, that is not information that the Government of Canada tracks at the granular level. We can say that the information is typically publicly disclosed through proactive disclosures where all contract amendments over $10,000 are made publicly available on the open government portal.