Public Accounts Committee on Sept. 25th, 2024

[Lysane Bolduc]

No, I did not talk specifically about Ms. Daly or her role.

As I said, when I was contacted, she was considered a witness. So as her employer, I met with her. A few minutes later, I learned that she was being investigated.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

You said it is important to you to look after your teams. That is all well and good, I understand that. Since you had never met Ms. Daly before though, why did you think you were the right person to assist her when she was stressed and didn't want to take part in the investigation? You could have asked Mr. von Schoenberg or her direct manager to do that.

Don't you think you stepped up a bit too much when that was not necessarily what was expected of you? One might even think that you had received orders.

[Lysane Bolduc]

That was not the case. I was not personally ordered to meet with Ms. Daly.

Let me state my position once again. Ms. Daly had expressed reluctance to take part in the investigation. She said she needed support in a difficult process. Since I was the director general, I thought that if I took part in the investigation and showed her I was sensitive to her situation, she would feel she was being supported by her organization. She perceived that in a different way, however.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much, Ms. Sinclair‑Desgagné.

Next is Mr. Desjarlais for two and a half minutes, please.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to continue on this, on what is a very obvious gap between the former TBIPS program and what you've been asked to do, which is to largely reform the program.

Is the concern companies like GC Strategies, Coradix and these other random players? To be just really frank, if you had to look at a list, you're seeing Amazon Web Services and you're seeing Microsoft. You're seeing big corporations bidding on these government contracts, but then you say, okay, we're going to go and pick this two-person company, GC Strategies, to just dole out a bunch of money and it's going to go under no periodic review.

That seems to have been the process, even though there are good policies in place. I've reviewed the policies in TBIPS. Why weren't they followed and why weren't they enforced?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you very much for the question.

As I've explained previously, we've already put in place measures to address concerns—

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

I'm sorry. I'm trying to understand what happened in the the ArriveCAN situation.

The Auditor General tables a report. It's our committee's job to understand how she comes to findings that are incredibly damning. These are concerns that Canadians have. Her office found that there was evidence of instances where people were being taken out to fancy dinners and lunches. In her report, she suggests that, in addition to these fancy dinners and lunches, they were known personally to individuals within the public service.

How is it possible that the rules that are in place, which ban—outright ban—and say no way can a public servant be meeting with these people inside of a restaurant, which took place...? Where was the critical system failure? How do we fix the critical system failure?

It's largely your job to fix that system. Can you give us confidence that you understand the issue so that it can actually be fixed? Is a company like GC Strategies able to do again what they did? Do you understand how they did it?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you very much for the question.

Again, I was not part of the procurement process at the time of ArriveCAN—

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

In your view of what happened at TBIPS, now that you're reforming it, and it seems like a big job, it's really important that you, as the official there, understand precisely what went wrong, whether that was within enforcement or within the initial procurement.

Was there an individual or a set of individuals who were bribed, who were taken to dinners, who got GC Strategies on...? I'm not saying that happened. I'm saying that's a really hard fact to miss in the Auditor General's report, and that deeply concerns me. What is your understanding of what took place to get GC Strategies on a list of preferred contractors? How was that made possible?

[Lysane Bolduc]

One of the new measures that's in place currently is that vendors are required to adhere to a code of conduct. It is part of the mandatory clauses that are part of our contracts now. I can't speak for the behaviour of individuals or vendors in that respect, but certainly, like you said, the policies and the procedures are in place.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Someone would have to be responsible, right, for the TBIPS list?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is the time, I'm afraid, Mr. Desjarlais.

Up next is Mr. Genuis.

You have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Erskine-Smith noted that there are some documents he'd like to have that would be useful.

Of course, Conservatives would support any request for government documents that he would like to make and that would further his understanding of this issue, so fire away. You won't have any opposition to that.

Ms. O'Gorman met with PCO right before her testimony.

For the officials here, did you meet with PCO at any point regarding the investigation that's happening or your testimony at committee?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you for the question.

Never.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

You've never met with PCO...?

[Lysane Bolduc]

No. I have not met with PCO regarding this affair or.... The last time I met with PCO was actually when I was with Indigenous Services Canada, so I was not even with the department at—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Okay. I'm going to come back to that, actually, but just in response to my earlier line of questioning, we have this internal investigation, allegedly. That internal investigation reports to the internal chain of command. That's what an internal investigation is.

Meanwhile, though, we have an internal factional conflict between public servants who are accusing each other of lying, of falsifying evidence, and that internal investigator reports to people who have already taken positions in the context of that internal conflict. That obviously raises significant concerns about the ability of that internal investigation to be genuinely impartial.

Do you think that an external investigation, external to the CBSA, would help to clear the air more than the internal investigation?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you very much for the question.

There have been external investigations. The Auditor General did investigate and so did the procurement ombud. In matters where internal investigations led to the need for the RCMP to get involved, my understanding is that the RCMP was asked to step in.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Right, but just to emphasize here, the Auditor General and the procurement ombud's work focused on some of the significant failures of the process. They're not geared towards identifying individual culpability for things that have happened.

The internal investigation appears very much to be investigating people with the view to holding people accountable, yet that internal investigation is caught up in a factional conflict, which implicates the highest levels of CBSA. You have a minister saying he wants a head on a platter and you have officials that are going back and forth over whose head it should be.

In that case, insofar as there's a need to identify who was responsible for certain decisions, shouldn't that investigation happen external to the CBSA, not inside of the CBSA?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you very much for the question.

I cannot speak for the investigation that's occurring at the CBSA.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Okay.

As you mentioned, you previously worked at Indigenous Affairs. Part of the arrive scam scandal involves abuses of indigenous procurement.

Have you been asking questions or are you seeing investigations taking place into abuses of indigenous procurement rules as part of what has taken place?

[Lysane Bolduc]

I'm aware that this particular department, which should speak for themselves for their responsibilities—conducts audits on indigenous companies. Also, I'm aware that this particular department has the mandate of—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I'm sorry, but I just want to drill into the work happening at CBSA.

If, as I suspect, rules around indigenous procurement have been broken, is that part of the internal investigation, or is that entirely being left to other people whom you hope are working on it?

[Lysane Bolduc]

Thank you very much for the question.

Again, I'm not aware of what's being investigated by the CBSA nor, for that matter, within PSPC, because I'm not part of those investigations. As I described earlier, on internal investigations, there are walls between the units carrying them out and—

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Okay. I'm sorry to jump in, Chair, but given that we are not hearing from these officials about the investigation of indigenous procurement, I'd just like to move:

That the committee report to the House that it supports recommendations from Indigenous leaders for an audit of Indigenous procurement.

We've heard those requests from various indigenous leaders for that audit of indigenous procurement. We're not able to get answers on that today, and I think it's important that this committee, as the committee that's responsible for engaging with the work of the Auditor General, would express its support for that call from indigenous leaders for that investigation.

I don't think it will be that contentious, but I wanted to put it on the table, Chair. Thank you.