Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, all, for your presence today. It's good to see you again.
There are a number of pieces to this and my colleagues have raised a number of the issues I was going to raise. That's all to the good. I'm going to start drilling down a bit into some of the weeds here.
We have problems with government-wide procurement, all the way from flying—as everybody follows the saga of military jets—down to hammers. Paragraph 5.62 says:
We found that the RCMP did not have a plan to manage the acquisition of carbines, causing bottlenecks in distribution and backlogs in firearm recertification and maintenance. We also found that in the RCMP’s effort to expedite the rollout of the carbines, the RCMP and Public Services and Procurement Canada did not follow procurement rules.
This matters.
When I look over to page 13, paragraph 5.72 adds further insult to injury. Not only did the RCMP not follow the procedures properly, and that's including Public Services and Procurement Canada, but once again Treasury Board let us down on its challenge function, which is its duty to make sure that these things are double-checked. There was a falling down there.
Specifically, under procurement, here's what troubled me the most:
5.71: Under procurement rules, the RCMP should have submitted these orders—
This would be for, I believe, the carbines:
—to Public Services and Procurement Canada as a single request. However, this request would have exceeded Public Services and Procurement Canada’s own purchase authority and therefore would have required approval from the Treasury Board. Instead, the RCMP split the order into three requests, which Public Services and Procurement Canada ordered under its own authority.
What's the deal, Commissioner? This looks, for all intents and purposes, like an absolute, deliberate attempt to get around requirements at Treasury Board, notwithstanding that it didn't do its job either. What's going on here, Commissioner?