Public Accounts Committee on May 30th, 2024

[Imraan Bashir]

That happened in May of 2020.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Do you think it was appropriate and ethical for the government to have a senior CBSA official direct a business to work with a favoured contractor—I'm asserting that they're a favoured contractor—like GC Strategies? Do you think it was appropriate and ethical?

[Imraan Bashir]

I think the Government of Canada can decide the way in which—

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I'm asking you, sir. Make a value judgment. On behalf of KPMG, is this the kind of company that KPMG does business with?

[Imraan Bashir]

We would do business with any company that—

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

You would do business with any company that's having their doors kicked in by the RCMP, that's obviously engaged in procurement processes that are illegal—

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

[Inaudible—Editor] business with any company—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

[Imraan Bashir]

Could I complete the answer?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I will allow an answer, Mr. Barrett.

[Imraan Bashir]

I'd like to complete the sentence. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We would do business with any company that passes our risk management processes, as GC Strategies did at that time.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Bradford, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Bernard, in response to an earlier question from MP Khalid, you indicated that you were surprised to see your company listed in the AG's report. Given that you made $3 million on contract work with ArriveCAN, why were you surprised that your company would be listed in the AG's report?

[John Bernard]

First, we had no ArriveCAN contracts. We had a call-up with the CBSA as a vehicle, and that vehicle was used.

I know that the Auditor General says $3 million. We immediately went and looked through all of our time sheets, and we were only able to identify $500,000.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Clarify “vehicle” for me. Did you not do work on the ArriveCAN app? Can you clarify what your work was?

[John Bernard]

In the federal government, procurement vehicles are brought up. We have a number of vehicles. We all do.

I can talk to you from my side, because I was also in the government and I had vehicles. Oftentimes, we needed to do some IT work, and it had to be done right away. We didn't have the resources, so we'd go through these vehicles.

We have such vehicles. We all do. We had three of those vehicles. One of them was never used at all. For two of them that were used, we identified at least half a million dollars through the time sheets.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Now I would like to hear from each one of the companies represented here today.

The CBSA indicated that contractors were selected because they helped to produce a faster result to build the app faster. Do you agree that Donna Cona, TEKsystems and KPMG helped to speed up the process and, from each of you, how? How did your involvement or participation do that?

Who wants to start? It doesn't matter to me.

[Imraan Bashir]

Thank you for the member's question.

Just to clarify, our work at KPMG was a cybersecurity assessment post-development of the application itself, so I can't really comment on how it sped up the development of the app.

I can comment on the fact that we did help identify areas for improvement to enhance the security of the application for the benefit of Canadian citizens who used it.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Okay.

[Barry Dowdall]

As was previously mentioned, we think, from the time sheets of the work that was done, our team was building infrastructure on the AWS cloud to accept data and provide business intelligence reports back, but it was not only from Public Health. There were many other applications that were providing data into this infrastructure, so we were building this infrastructure on the AWS cloud.

I don't know if it helped speed up the app—I have no idea—but we were creating infrastructure for a number of different applications.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

We're not talking about speeding up the app. We're talking about speeding up the process of developing the app, which was the question.

[Barry Dowdall]

Well, you had to build something in the cloud, to sit in the cloud, so yes, it would help.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Loschmann, how about your company?

[Christopher Loschmann]

As I mentioned in our opening statement, we bid on and won two contracts with CBSA that went through a competitive process in which we were selected because of our value to the Crown. Yes, I think we delivered value to CBSA.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Now, for each one of the companies, is there any new information or anything else that you would like to add or clarify during your testimony today? We'll be wrapping up soon. Is there anything?