IBM negotiated changes to ours.
Evidence of meeting #12 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contract.
A video is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #12 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contract.
A video is available from Parliament.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
That's correct. It's common.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
It's very common. It's normal.
What was the issue in setting service levels and penalties under the contract? Where did we go wrong?
President, Shared Services Canada
If I could jump in here, one of the things we did was customize our technical work requirements, which they built to, according to our specification. This meant we had no commercial equivalent. In that contract, we defined our own terminology.
We also did things like embedding certain government services that needed to be used. For example, we have a contract for a 1-800 service. We said they must use that contract. As soon as we did that, we took away the accountability of the vendor because we put the government in the middle.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
What you're saying is that when we negotiated the contracts, we left open questions of whether or not penalties were owed in the breakdown of certain services, because the vendor could argue that it wasn't their fault since they were forced to use one of our services.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
That's where we went wrong, and that's what you're fixing in the current contract. Is that correct?
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Now it will be easier to impute blame to the vendor when there's an outage, for example, because the vendor will be solely responsible for certain parts of the contract. Is that correct?
President, Shared Services Canada
That's correct. We're also using standard commercial terms and conditions so there is no ambiguity in what they mean. There's no government definition or vendor definition. There is one definition, and it's commercial.
Conservative
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
This is the last question, I promise.
I am confused by that, and you said it a couple of times. I want to try to get precision out of this.
In the contract—whether it was our standard terms or the vendor's standard terms, whatever—there would be clear legal language to set that out. What do you mean in this case when you're talking about ambiguity? Whether it was our standard or their standard.... I understand that the standards were mixed up in such a way that it was difficult to impute blame to the vendor, but what else do you mean by what you're saying?
President, Shared Services Canada
We created ambiguity in the definition. By using our definition, we created ambiguity in the interpretation when the vendor came in. That's our issue, and we will never do that again.
October 28th, 2025 / 4:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you all very much.
Mr. Lemire has the floor again for two and a half minutes.
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Jones, my questions are a bit specific, so you can provide written answers.
Can you provide us with the list of contracts Shared Services Canada has signed with IBM since 2015, the estimated value of those contracts at the time, the actual costs of the contracts, and the reasons for the cost overruns, which we now know there were?
Can you also provide us with the list of sole-source contracts Shared Services Canada currently has, so we can do a proper comparison?
Lastly, can you provide us with the estimated cost of the digital platform modernization project at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, IRCC? I'm especially interested in that, specifically the initial estimate and the actual cost for phase 1, as well as the estimates for the subsequent phases.
President, Shared Services Canada
We can certainly provide you with a written list of Shared Services Canada's contracts. The information is also available on the Open Government website, but we can of course provide you with the list.
As for IRCC's digital platform modernization project, I don't have access to the details you're asking about.
Bloc
Sébastien Lemire Bloc Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
We'll have the chance to revisit that. I thought the information flowed through your department.
Mr. Hayes, just so you don't get too bored, I'd like to ask you a question. How many audits of IT contracts have you done in the past decade, and are any others under way?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
We've done many audits on technical services contracts, software contracts. We have other audits planned as well. For example, we announced that we would be examining current and future contracts in connection with this audit.
I will say that, in many of our audits, we identified the same challenges around contract design, but also issues with implementing the terms of the contract. What we try to do is identify the root causes of the challenges in an effort to improve government contracts.
Conservative
Conservative
Gérard Deltell Conservative Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think many of us have been thinking the same thing for the past week, knowing that the CRA is facing serious problems. I think about the agency's thousands of workers and agents who go to work wanting to provide the best possible information to their clients on the line. Unfortunately, the Auditor General found that, four out of five times, the information agents gave callers was not accurate. It's not their fault, though; they weren't trained properly.
The agency issued a $4.9‑million refund to a business that was not entitled to it and the matter is now before the courts. When I see something so appalling happening, I think about those senior officials at the agency who want to do something, who have the knowledge and training to do something, but whose work the agency would prefer be done by machines. That is where things at the CRA stand right now. The workers aren't the problem. The managers and the rules they have to follow are the problem.
Mr. Pagé, I'm going to ask you the question again. It's a technical question, one that has nothing to do with policy or the court case. What is the amount, the threshold, at which a transaction is no longer subject to automated review and has to be reviewed by a human?