Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2025

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I would beg to differ. We could have a very good debate on that.

When you put something on social media—and I can actually provide you with the advertisement—you're technically advertising something, and you're telling people who don't live in Canada what Canada has to offer them. It's transparent, yes, but you could refer to all the legal documents that someone needs to immigrate to this country. When you pick out the things that would entice them the most to come to this country, I would call that advertising, sir.

That's beside the point. You don't have to answer that.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Your time is done, Mr. Kuruc.

[Ned Kuruc, Conservative, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Next, we have Ms. Yip for five minutes, please.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Kochhar, I understand that the IRCC has launched a consultant reduction strategy to decrease departmental reliance on external expertise. Can you tell us about the strategy and what progress has been made to date?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

As I mentioned in the earlier line of questioning, we are relying more and more on the expertise that we can actually bring through the public service. The goal is to reduce the reliance on consultants in IRCC to around 13% in the next three years in the office of the chief information officer.

Most of our consultants are IT consultants who are helping us with a very complex system. Maintaining a small, targeted use of consultants is a prudent and common procedure for temporary needs. The second is the search capacity, which we need, knowledge transfer, and also upscaling. We also have specialized expertise, which we probably need to maintain on that. An important part that we have set up over time is a target and a strategy that is focused on knowledge transfer.

The overall goal is to let go of 300 out of the 351 consultants we have by April 2028. It may sound like this is far away, but this is very aggressive in our world, where we are removing the reliance on consultants and training and hiring the public servants on that one. As of today, we have achieved a reduction of 127 of them. We are hiring people to backfill, but it is not one-to-one. We have approximately 52 new public servants who have been trained and are taking on the work of the 127 consultants we have let go.

This is our attempt to make sure that we have less reliance on consultants and more reliance on the in-house expertise. As we move forward with our transformation, these are the people who will support us for a longer period of time.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

How will you proceed to a complete digital transformation while maintaining back-end legacy operations? Are you going to need more consultants?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

This is the question we grapple with: How do we actually get the transformation into a new end state while we are still working on our legacy system?

The legacy system has to be maintained until the time when we can switch over to the new system. We are putting less reliance on the legacy system by having consultants. We are moving the expertise into what is coming next. We do need some surge capacity, because that does not exist in-house for the new system. Once we have transferred over our reliance on the consultants, which we want to be much lower.... As I said, we may need them for surge capacity. It will never be that we will not have the consultants, but we will have them only for those times we really need them, and most of it would be done in-house.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Is that what you refer to as backbone IT consultants?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

Yes, that is what it is, in terms of maintaining the IT infrastructure, which allows us to do the processing.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Are the paper files—which shocked me when I first heard of this before the pandemic—still there?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

The paper files have evaporated from our processing pieces. We are more and more.... There are some areas where we do still have the paper, but it is mostly converted into electronic. If not, we have digitized most of our work in that category.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

In terms of your comments on the Auditor General's recommendations, how can we be sure that this will not happen again?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

We have revised our procedure. We are making sure that nobody gets any access to our system without having proper approval of their security.

Second, we are making sure that any of the questions asked during the RFP process are transparently available to all the bidders, and should we need to revise the RFP, we will do that.

We have done this, in addition to firming up our conflict of interest, and many other suggestions that came from the ombud's office too.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is your time.

We're going into our fourth and last round. It's going to be just a half-round. It will consist of the official opposition plus the Bloc Québécois. Then I'll end with the government.

Mr. Osborne, if you're going to split your time with one of your colleagues, you'll have plenty of time for that.

Without further ado, Mr. Stevenson, you have the floor for about five minutes, please.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

I have little bits of questions spread out all over the place.

To summarize, Mr. Hayes, the policy from the Treasury Board is about who makes decisions as to the procurement rules and how they're going to.... It's not so much the department, but it's the Treasury Board that says who's going to make the rules for contracting and that sort of thing when they're different from.... I'm just making sure that it's the government making that decision, not the departments. They're being told which way to do it when it's Crown corporations versus departments.

[Andrew Hayes]

The government sets the policies for departments and agencies. The Crown corporations set their own policies.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Mr. Kochhar, going from what some of my colleagues said—and not to belabour the point about advertising—on the transparency of information, you stated that when individuals come here, they would have x amount of health care available to them. Were they actually informed about the state of our health care system, with lineups, not having doctors and poor access, or was it just stated that they're going to have free health care when they get here?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

As I mentioned, we put these things on the web to make sure that people are aware when they arrive. There are no qualifiers as to what happens.... We don't have any qualifiers on that. We just have the aspects that express, if you're immigrating to Canada, what things will be available to you.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

That's fine. Basically, they're just given a one-liner, and they don't get too much detail.

I'll move on to Ms. Walker.

With regard to Canada Post and the adoption of McKinsey's recommendations, do you know how much they actually saved, going forward, for Canada Post?

[Maya Walker]

At the time we were doing the studies with McKinsey, it was really to look at how we could generate revenue for our current situation, which continues now, when we're still losing money.

We are in a position now to put forward those recommendations. They were also enhancing internal decisions that Canada Post was making for itself. They provided insight, but at the end of the day, it is our teams putting forward the plans that were just released to the government.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Did Canada Post have some mitigation with regard to the conflicts McKinsey might have with simultaneously advising their global competitors, such as Amazon and UPS? Did they take into consideration that it might not always be the same recommendations from either side?

[Maya Walker]

Again, at the time when we were doing work with McKinsey, Canada Post was looking at various ways. Since that time, letter mail has continued to decline. The market did change considerably post-COVID with new entrants. Therefore, as subject matter experts in those very strategic and specific needs.... That information was taken into consideration and then enhanced with our own internal knowledge and understanding of the current market.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I have one minute left.

I'll probably just cede my time because I won't be able to get through a question.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I will take you up on that. Thank you, Mr. Stevenson.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Lemire for two and a half minutes, plus the remaining several seconds of Mr. Stevenson's time.