Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I do want to thank the Auditor General again for being present with us on this important topic.
I think the Auditor General has heard my comments in the past that I believe it is a failure on three fronts.
One, it failed to deliver good management. Two, it failed to deliver the best value for Canadian taxpayers' dollars. Three, there was the generational failure and the consecutive failure of governments to finally address the critical underfunding of the public service that has created a vulnerability in which our public service is then forced to contract very expensive and risky management companies, or app development companies in this case, to continue robbing the public purse. We've see this time and time again. We've seen it with the Phoenix pay system. We've seen it double under the Conservatives' outsourcing. Here, we're finally seeing the consequences of a drastic and dramatically underfunded public service.
I want to turn our attention to the graph that's outlined in exhibit 1.2. In exhibit 1.2 on page 7 of the Auditor General's report, it suggests that “The Canada Border Services Agency continued to rely heavily on external resources to develop ArriveCAN from April 2020 to March 2023”. You can see there are many instances. We can see, at least in some cases, the doubling of the costs to the government that would be associated with the internal development of these kinds of apps versus the costs that are presented to the government when looking at external contracts.
These external contracts balloon dramatically. Look at the Phoenix pay system today and at the billions of dollars originally contracted out by the Conservatives. We're still dealing with that terrible decision today. Now we're seeing the Liberals continue that tradition and continue to underfund our public service, and we're continuing to see what is the worst-case scenario for Canadians.
I also want to look at a very important fact that I think I would like to point to now that the Public Health Agency of Canada is present here today. The Auditor General found that there was actually an instance where the Public Health Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency undertook a process of jointly finding ways to develop this app. What we found is that, in that process, they failed to actually come to an agreement on governance, an agreement on budget, an agreement on process and an agreement as to, ultimately, who was going to be overseeing and operating this project.
This question is for the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. How could it have been for almost a year that we saw no formal agreement between the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency with regard to governance? Can you explain why?