Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2025

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

I do thank you for your honest answers.

Thank you, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

That is your time. You can pick it up again down the road.

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

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

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today.

Mr. Kochhar, I seem to remember your coming from another department, health. It's good to see you here with a different department.

Mr. Settano, you mentioned in your opening statement that BDC did not wish to be a burden on the taxpayer and that it did provide dividends, which is commendable. What value for money did BDC provide to the taxpayer?

[Christian Settano]

Do you mean overall?

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

Yes, I mean just overall, while using the consultants. Did they save you money? Did they help BDC?

[Christian Settano]

Basically, when we use consultants, it's really important to note that we do it to complete our talent in-house. They really have the expertise, where they tested and validated our assumptions. The big value for money was that they helped us define the new strategy, which we will enhance for the next five to 10 years. We're still in it today. They gave us deep insight into how other financial institutions were approaching the market. We have to go back in time, as this was a post-COVID situation where people were very, very busy responding to various government programs. Everyone was really busy with that, so it was really important that we got that insight and value for money from them.

Basically, today we can say that we have increased by 49% the number of customers served throughout all of Canada, with the number of Canadian entrepreneurs we serve rising from 72,000 to roughly 107,000 today. All of this was part of the new strategy we implemented following the mandate we worked on, and we worked with McKinsey.

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

Did McKinsey provide unique expertise, as you mentioned in your opening statement, that in-house employees couldn't provide?

[Christian Settano]

The ideas and the ambition and the thinking were all coming from in-house. What McKinsey did, as I said, really completed that by having access to the benchmarking of all of the market, testing our approach, testing the different ideas, and also making sure that our reach approach.... We wanted to reach more and more Canadian entrepreneurs, which was an important point within our strategy, so that was something that was a success following the implementation of this strategy.

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

You mentioned that you're still using this strategy. Has this helped following the imposition of the American tariffs and changing global protectionism?

[Christian Settano]

It's part of our day-to-day business. Everything we do today is really in line with the strategy.

Basically, what we have done with regard to tariffs is that various programs—like the pivot to grow program, which has been in place for the last few months, and other programs with regard to the softwood lumber issues—are all directly or indirectly in relation to our reach strategy for helping Canadian entrepreneurs. Our global strategy has four pillars—including growth and competitiveness, reach and relevance, and big challenges of our time—and we're making sure we're always financially sustainable within those.

When you look at the current situation with the tariffs, we can say for sure that the strategy we have today is the right one and it's helping us deliver on the promise for Canadian entrepreneurs.

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

Would you use external consultants today?

[Christian Settano]

To come and vet our strategy or for other specific mandates, for sure, we would use consultants for what I would call completion of work. We do it here and there, and we obviously follow rigorously our procurement policy and directive, for sure. Yes, we would.

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

Mr. Kochhar, how did the pandemic impact IRCC services?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

The pandemic was something that really exposed the need for us to do things differently, given the fact that we were looking at transforming our ways of delivering visas.

To us, that was a huge backlog that occurred over time, because there was pent-up demand for the visitors and others to visit, so there was a need for us to look at effective, quick ways to assess the applications and then issue or refuse the visas. That is what we were focused on, given the fact that we were also looking at making sure that the human capital that would come in to assist us during the COVID crisis, whether they were personal support workers or others, could actually come and contribute to us.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

That is your time, Ms. Yip.

Mr. Lemire, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Kochhar, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada says that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada justified its contracting out of IT services in 2021 on the grounds that the department lacked the expertise it was looking for. Excessively long staffing processes were also creating recruitment and retention issues. As a result, we had to turn to contractors to get more human resources. There was also no funding for certain positions.

You invested $134 million in various IT services, with preference given to subcontractors rather than public service expertise.

Again in 2021, in the budget, you estimated the cost of modernizing the digital platform at $827.3 million over five years. You requested additional funding of $134.8 million in 2025-26. That adds up to an expenditure on modernization of over $1 billion, on top of the various IT services that I mentioned earlier.

Why don't you trust the department's own resources?

Can you give us your estimate of how much the modernization project is going to cost in 2025?

[Harpreet S. Kochhar]

Mr. Chair, I'll answer a part of that, and then I'll turn to my colleague Jason, if you permit.

First of all, as I said earlier, we have great trust in the internal capacity that we have, but our internal capacity also needs some surge support in cases where we are under a crisis situation, in cases where we are modernizing and in cases where we are building new systems. We have a legacy system that is mostly supported by our own internal resources, but there are times when we need to bring in new folks from outside, whether they are subcontractors or those with specific expertise, for a specific period of time so that we can build something new onto that.

I'll turn to Jason, who has been working on the DPM-3, as the member pointed out, and he can give a little bit more of an idea.

[Jason Choueiri]

To answer the other part of the question, we do value the public service's contributions. We've actually hired as part of the digital platform modernization.

We hired over 300 new employees, almost half of them from within our department. We simply provided them with training to upgrade their skills. The others came from outside the government, but now they're employees of our department. Part of the work is being outsourced to the private sector because of a need for expertise that the public service can't meet.

As the deputy minister mentioned, modernizing the digital platform is complex. We're working with new platforms that we've never used before. So it's important to get the necessary expertise—which happens to exist in the private sector right now—so that we can train our employees to grow the platform moving forward.

That's our strategy. It isn't limited to the private sector. We're investing heavily in our employees as well. As I said, we've already hired over 300 new employees.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Stevenson, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

I start with Mr. Hayes, with similar questioning as the previous times when we talked about the contracts. Can you review for me why there is such a difference between some of the rules and regulations in regard to how they deal with things within the departments versus in the Crown corporations? Why are they different, and what are some of those differences?

[Andrew Hayes]

The rules that apply to government departments and agencies are set by the Treasury Board Secretariat, Treasury Board itself and the work that PSPC, Public Services and Procurement Canada, does. Those rules apply across the board to departments and agencies. Crown corporations are at an arm's length from the government. They are able to have their own procurement policies; however, they are subject to some of the broader requirements of the law, like trade agreements and those sorts of things.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

That's basically what I wanted you to say.

With that, would it not be advantageous to have the instructions to Crown corporations to have, at least at minimum, the same standards as the department, even though they have different requirements?

[Andrew Hayes]

That's a policy question. It comes down to the intention of having Crown corporations operate under a different model from the government oversight that happens centrally. I think, though, it is reasonable to expect that the Crown corporations will try to construct their procurement processes to benefit from competition and the best services that can be achieved at the lowest price for the taxpayer.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

Ms. Walker, you mentioned in your opening statement that there were some changes.... I believe the report was back in 2024. You said that you started some implementations of new processes. Can you tell me when that started, and whether or not you have some results to report back on how that was being effected?

[Maya Walker]

Following the Auditor General's report, we also ran an internal audit to look at our process and policies: looking for improvements; taking some of the observations that were put forward through the report; and, following the release of the report, following some Treasury Board guidelines that were released regarding best practices around putting in place professional services. We started there. The results of that also line up with our commitment to the government to reduce our consulting spend, following the McKinsey review. It really just lines up with the best practices of the policies that we have in place.