Mr. Speaker, it is important for me to rise in the House and speak about the Cúram software because there have been outrageous cost overruns.
I will remind members of the facts. In the beginning, the project was expected to cost $1.75 billion, but it is now costing $6.6 billion. That is a cost overrun of more than $5 billion, which is almost ten times the cost of SAAQclic. In that case, Quebec took its responsibility seriously and had a judge conduct an independent inquiry. Recommendations were made to ensure that these sorts of IT errors would not happen again.
Ottawa seems to be ignoring this reality. We asked questions in the House and we were told by ministers that we should be happy about Cúram and that the Bloc Québécois was just fearmongering. However, obviously, the money being wasted in this financial scandal belongs to Quebeckers and Canadians.
Two weeks ago, we were given a technical briefing. It seemed as though the Liberals no longer had any good answers to give the House. The government decided to provide a technical briefing to try to manage the crisis. The technical briefing told us little that we did not already know. That is one of the problems.
They did the same thing with journalists. The journalists reported—so this is public—that Ottawa knew the first estimate was not reliable and costs were going to explode. Is that responsible management? Absolutely not. Government officials said that IT projects always involve cost overruns. Why is that? If we all managed our own finances that way, it would be catastrophic.
Government officials cannot even identify the new functionalities or the short-term program operating costs. Apparently, the post-2031 operating costs have not even been evaluated. That is an additional $660 million per year. That is an annual cost overrun equivalent to a whole SAAQclic, and it was not planned for.
The federal government needs to do the responsible thing and give us the real numbers. The initial estimate, $1.75 billion, was only for the tranche 1 costs. The government says there is no problem and it really did not have that information. According to a 2023 briefing note to the Minister of Citizens' Services at the time, the December 2020 cost estimate was $2.2 billion for the benefits delivery modernization program, which included old age security, employment insurance and the Canada pension plan.
This contradicts the idea that the government did not know the figures, but an assessment was conducted. The Auditor General's report later on yielded new figures in 2022. At that point, the estimate was more in the range of $3 billion to $4 billion. The Auditor General's report was particularly noteworthy because it also indicated that the government knew the Cúram program was problematic, given that there were precedents, notably in Ontario. The Ontario government had used this platform for its Social Assistance Management System software in 2009.
This project was the subject of an audit carried out by the Auditor General of Ontario in 2015. Her report stated that IBM had missed deadlines for converting the data while also introducing errors and that IBM had not provided adequate expertise. It stated that the ministry said it had relied on the IBM project manager to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of Cúram consultants' work, that the consultants were overseen by an IBM consultant, and that Cúram consultants worked inefficiently before the launch.
The same mistakes are being repeated. My question is: When will there be an independent public inquiry? We are looking at a figure of $6.6 billion, and we know it is going to keep going up.