Evidence of meeting #112 for Public Accounts in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was kpmg.
A video is available from Parliament.
Partner and National Leader, Cybersecurity, KPMG
There was only the July meeting, and then we were asked to provide a proposal to GC Strategies in September.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay.
Who was at both of the meetings?
Partner and National Leader, Cybersecurity, KPMG
The July cybersecurity discovery meeting was between Imraan Bashir and GC Strategies.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Who was there from GC Strategies?
Partner and National Leader, Cybersecurity, KPMG
I believe that was Kristian Firth.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay.
Was it just the two people at both meetings?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Just for certainty, KPMG has spent zero dollars on hospitality for Government of Canada officials. Is that correct?
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
To my knowledge, that is correct.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Does KPMG provide bonuses for securing contracts with the Government of Canada?
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
The way we compensate our staff is actually a pretty complicated process.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
You've done about a quarter of a billion dollars in business with the Government of Canada under Justin Trudeau. We're looking to find out if staff were given bonuses for getting that work, like the three-quarters of a million dollars that KPMG was paid to advise the government on spending less on contracting.
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
I will say that no staff member or partner is directly compensated for a particular engagement. We use a complicated, multivariate formula to assess a staff member's performance against the firm's performance, their individual performance and their contribution to Canadian society. It's a holistic formula that gets pulled together to identify compensation for all of our staff.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you. That is your time.
Ms. Khalid, we will go over to you for five minutes, please, when you're ready.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses.
Let's unpack the ArriveCAN app and the scope of work and services you provided in general. Were the services that were provided just for the ArriveCAN app, or did they have a broader application within these different departments that we're talking about? I know that there were big conversations about digitalization in general.
Partner and National Leader, Cybersecurity, KPMG
The cybersecurity work was specific to the ArriveCAN app and the underlying hosting platform, which was in the cloud.
I will defer to Ms. Lee to speak about her body of work.
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
For the support that KPMG provided to the Public Health Agency, none of that work had anything to do with the app itself. As I mentioned before, all of the work we did was in analyzing and helping them to plan for the operational impacts of the different policy changes that were coming through OICs under the Quarantine Act. We also helped facilitate a number of stakeholder engagement sessions to receive input on how those changes should come about.
None of the work that we did, though, had anything to do with the app itself. It was more about how the experience of travellers, the travel industry and the border control measures needed to be changed or updated based on the evolving policies.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
When we see a number of different changes in the work orders, etc., I'm assuming that would be based on new information required in that changing landscape.
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
If I understand your question, the work was such that every single time there was a new order in council, a policy change under the Quarantine Act, I think you can probably imagine the pressure that put not only on the Public Health Agency, but on the border services—immigration, for instance, and the Transport Canada department.
Numerous agencies and departments were impacted by these order in council changes and, as I said, our work was to help them really think very deeply and thoughtfully about the ways in which operations would have to be updated to accommodate those order in council changes in a timely manner. Sometimes there was very little time for any of these departments or external stakeholders to respond to those OICs. For that reason, they relied heavily on us to help them analyze in a timely manner what the process impacts would be, for instance, or the downstream impacts to staff training, or supports that might be required at different border crossings to facilitate the implementation of those changes.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
At any time, did you find that you had to do a complete turnaround of information or analysis that you had provided based on orders in council?
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
There were numerous times when the Public Health Agency was expected to communicate with their upper management about what they thought they should do to respond operationally. For instance, there were a couple of times when they asked...actually, it was more than a couple of times. There were a number of times when they asked us to reach out to our global network of KPMG colleagues around the world to talk to federal governments in other jurisdictions or to talk to our transport-related colleagues to understand what was happening from an air operator perspective, for instance, or in the airports themselves. We had 24 to 48 hours to turn around a global environmental scan that could inform policies and the implementation of those policies.
This was actually a constant phenomenon during the pandemic, and it went on for two and a half years because of the multiple waves of the pandemic. The Public Health Agency was under an incredible amount of pressure to respond during this time, and we did everything we could to help them do so in a timely manner.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Do you think Canadians got value for their dollars with this app?
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
As I said, neither the work we did through the Public Health Agency nor the work we did directly...although the cybersecurity work was an audit of the cyber-parameters of the app. None of our engagement work had anything to do with the development of the app itself, so it's very difficult for us to comment on that.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you.
Lastly, what steps did both of you take to prepare for the meeting today?
Partner and National Leader, Digital Health Transformation Practice, KPMG
We of course prepared very diligently, because we take this extremely seriously and we wanted to make sure we could come prepared to answer all of your questions today. We contacted our colleagues who work in this space and, obviously, our colleagues who worked on the engagements. We spoke with our legal counsel and our advisers to prepare so that we could respond to all of your questions today.