Thank you very much for your question. I genuinely appreciate being able to circle back to it.
I want to be clear that I'm speaking to you as the deputy, but I was the assistant deputy minister at the time these contracts were being let.
It's really important to understand that during the first few years of the pandemic, PSPC awarded 20 new contracts to CBSA for pandemic response. There were 20 contracts. Those contracts were not ArriveCAN-specific: they were IT consulting-specific and software licensing.
As for who authorized those contracts, they were authorized at various levels depending on the dollar value. None needed the authority of the minister or the deputy minister, and two needed my authority as the ADM. I think these are the two that are of interest to the committee.
More specifically on those 20 contracts that we awarded on behalf of CBSA, I authorized two of them as the ADM of procurement, the two that went to GC Strategies based on a recommendation of the procurement team, the officers who you saw who testified a couple of weeks ago. The two I authorized—this is important for the committee, and there are forms on this—were for IT assistance to help the Public Health Agency, Health Canada and CBSA integrate multiple data sources on a real-time basis.
The second contract was for professional services to provide digital support to CBSA across a variety of low-touch, no-touch initiatives that they needed for their operations.