Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to describe Public Services and Procurement Canada's role in supporting the Canada Border Services Agency on the ArriveCAN work.
I am joined today by three members of my team working under our professional services procurement directorate: Ms. Angela Durigan, manager, Silvana Mansour, team leader, and Anita Chan, procurement specialist.
I would highlight that it is extraordinary for frontline operational procurement officers to be called to testify in front of parliamentarians. I would like to thank them for joining me here today to support the committee’s study by providing more insight into procurement and the roles of procurement professionals.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather today is the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
In the earliest days of the pandemic, when the Government of Canada, like all other governments, was working flat out to respond to the pandemic, the procurement professionals at PSPC worked tirelessly to support departments and agencies to source supplies and suppliers in support of its response. To put things in perspective, this was in the early days of the pandemic, when there were lockdowns across the country, hospitals were operating beyond capacity and people were sick and dying. It was also a time when supply chains broke down. It was very difficult to source supplies and find service providers.
At this time, the Canada Border Services Agency analyzed their internal capacity. They did not have the capacity to develop an app with their staffing resources. As a result, CBSA contacted our department for an urgent requirement for professional services to support the development, integration and maintenance of an urgently needed tool to support the implementation of border measures in order to reduce the risk of importation and transmission of COVID-19. This would become the tool we now know as ArriveCAN.
CBSA looked at various options to deliver the application, including leveraging internal staff. However, this option was discarded, as they did not have the capacity or the technical know-how to develop an app of this complexity with the staff available. To find the IT support they needed, PSPC helped CBSA access resources under several PSPC-managed professional services methods of supply and put in place new contracts to fulfill the requirements, some of which were issued under emergency contracting authorities.
Based on information received from CBSA to date, a total of 46 contracts were used, in whole or in part, by CBSA to procure professional services and software licences to support, develop and maintain the ArriveCAN app. Thirty-one of these contracts were awarded by my department. Out of these 31 contracts, 19 were competitively awarded under pre-established supply arrangements; eight were to procure software licences where it was necessary to use sole-sourced contracts due to intellectual property rights or urgent need; and four were sole-sourced contracts for IT consulting services due to the pressing emergency.
To be clear, the government contracts regulations and the associated policy framework allow PSPC and departments to enter into sole-sourced contracts when there is a pressing emergency. The pandemic was such an emergency. Further, in order to support the execution of an effective and rapid government response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, TBS approved time-limited increases to those emergency contracting authority limits.
For 23 contracts, the work was authorized “as and when requested” through task authorizations. Most of these task-based contracts were put in place using the government’s pre-existing methods of supply.
These arrangements allow Canada to solicit proposals from a pool of pre-qualified suppliers, based on a list of pre-defined criteria, and to take advantage of pre-established contract terms and conditions.
These arrangements were established to add efficiency to the procurement process and to provide clients faster services with less collective administrative cost. By design, they provide a framework for client departments to put in place their own contracts and task authorizations much more easily and to administer their own contracts.
Under these arrangements, client departments develop statements of work and evaluation criteria for the selection process. If the contract value is under $3.75 million, the department can serve as the contracting authority, run the procurement process and put in place the contract. If it is over $3.75 million, PSPC administers the selection and contract award. In both cases, it is the client department that evaluates technical proposals and conducts verifications and clarifications. PSPC, as contracting authority, undertakes the financial assessment and applies the evaluation criteria to recommend a winner. We all verify company and individual security clearances at the time of the award. We also award the contract, once approved by the client department.
These contracts allowed CBSA to move quickly to bring in the resources they needed with the specific technical skills at different points in the development of the app.
Once the contract is in place, it is administered in a shared responsibility between PSPC—
