Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
If we consider only what happened during the pandemic and the ArriveCAN app alone, we might be tempted to believe that the problem lies with the Canada Border Services Agency and that it bears most of the responsibility in this matter. Fair enough.
However, the ombudsman's report and the Auditor General's report found that the same type of procurement issue happened at Shared Services Canada, namely a lack of documentation at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, and yet that didn't stop ArriveCAN from going ahead. The same problem also came up at the Public Health Agency of Canada when it didn't follow procedures and awarded a contract to KPMG with no competitive process. So this issue appears to have been widespread during the pandemic.
If we take a closer look at the issue and go to the Open Government website, we see that about 3,000 contracts were awarded without a competitive process during the pandemic. Moreover, if we go back a little further, we realize that in 2017, well before the pandemic, the awarding of these types of contracts skyrocketed. We're talking about several thousand contracts awarded in a non-competitive manner, well before the pandemic.
How do you explain such a sharp increase in non-competitive awarding of contracts? How do you explain so many contracts being awarded in a non-competitive manner for amounts not always under $25,000, as they should have been, even in a quieter period?