Mr. Speaker, I move that the eighth report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, presented on Monday, March 23, be concurred in.
First, I want to say that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Richmond—Arthabaska, whose co-operation on this issue has been invaluable.
The motion we are debating is as follows:
That the committee report to the House to request that the government establish a public and independent inquiry into cost overruns on IT contracts, including the Phoenix pay system, ArriveCAN and Benefits Delivery Modernization programme.
First, I want to reiterate my support for the many seniors in need who do not have access to their benefits because of the problems with the Cúram software.
I will begin my speech by saying something that I think all my colleagues in the House will agree with. The Bloc Québécois knows that that the outdated computer systems had to be replaced. No one is denying that. We agree with modernizing our IT systems.
The government keeps claiming that we want to hang onto the old systems that date back to the early 1960s, but that is false. We are in favour of modernizing our IT systems. What we are speaking out against today is the skyrocketing costs associated with IT contracts and the government's lack of expertise in this area. That is why we are calling for an independent public inquiry on the management of IT contracts, and the Quebec National Assembly has also adopted a unanimous motion to that effect.
The Prime Minister made the same type of claim when answering a question that I asked him in the House. He said that the Bloc Québécois had not attended a technical briefing, when that briefing was actually scheduled for the next day. The Bloc Québécois did its homework. We take our work seriously. For me, the answers that senior officials gave to the media at a technical briefing last week clearly demonstrate the importance of calling an independent public inquiry. We need to put politics aside and have a judge examine this issue.
First, let me reiterate one critical point: The estimates were not reliable, and the department knew that. The official quoted in La Presse stated that there were no precise estimates and that the government knew the costs were going to balloon. They went on to say that cost overruns often happen with big IT projects. This means that some officials gave the department estimates they knew to be inaccurate. Ministers knew that, but they decided to move forward anyway.
This is extremely troubling for me. It means that Canada's public service does not have the necessary expertise to evaluate IT contracts. It cannot say whether IT consultants are telling them the truth or not, which means that expertise is now in the hands of the private sector, and the private sector has no compunction about putting both hands in the cookie jar. Officials also said they were surprised to learn that it would cost money to dismantle the system that they have to replace. Why was this analysis not done before an estimate was submitted? Analyzing the cost of a transformation is a no-brainer.
The Prime Minister and the departments justified the ballooning costs by saying that the benefits delivery modernization program was only delayed for old age security. However, briefing notes, question period notes and ministerial transition books consistently mention a figure of $2.3 billion to complete the benefit delivery modernization program. At no point does any document say otherwise.
The proof is that a note dated September 20, 2023, prepared for the member for Burnaby North—Seymour, the then minister of citizens' services, clearly states: “The December 2020 Budget of $2.2B included estimated costs for OAS, EI and CPP on the Benefits Delivery Modernization (BDM) Programme”.
The government knew that the estimated budget was $2.2 billion in December 2020. It never questioned whether this amount would cover every phase of the benefits delivery modernization program. Even the Clerk of the Privy Council mentioned this to then-prime minister Justin Trudeau in a memo dated May 27, 2022. She wrote that there were concerns about Employment and Social Development Canada’s ability to deliver the program on time and on budget, and that was before the Auditor General’s report on the project was tabled in 2023.
When journalists questioned officials last week as to why there were nearly $5 billion in cost overruns, they did not receive an answer. What is even more concerning is that no one knows the system’s operating costs. In fact, the civil servant who provided the technical briefing was quoted in in La Presse as saying, “As for future costs, five or six years from now when the program is completed, I don’t have any specific figures.” He confirmed that there would be recurring costs to run the program.
According to experts consulted by La Presse, these costs, which include software licences, training, hosting and adjustments, should account for between 10% and 15% of the initial development costs. They will be at least $600 million per year for this program, which is insane. Why are these costs not known? Why is this not part of the contract analysis? Why is the person in charge of this program unable to answer questions about that? This clearly shows that the government does not have the expertise needed to evaluate these IT contracts. There is also the $3.5 billion that will go to private firms. Right now, nearly $1 billion has already been allocated to the program.
The Cúram program was previously deployed in Ontario and led to huge problems. Who knew about the issues with Cúram? The member for Markham—Stouffville was well aware of what Ontario went through. She is well aware of the report from the Auditor General of Ontario. She was an Ontario MPP at the time. The findings are damning: IBM missed data conversion deadlines, and the data contained errors. IBM did not provide adequate expertise. The Ontario ministry relied on the IBM project manager to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the Cúram consultants. In short, these findings raise questions about the data.
When the government uses consultants from private firms, it risks becoming dependent on them. The government is dependent on them. I should add that government programs always require adjustments and customization. We saw these kinds of problems with the Phoenix pay system: IBM was surprised that it had to provide a French version of the software, since the government is required to be bilingual because there are two official languages. The same thing happened with Cúram. According to the officials' report, the translations were not done properly.
We know that Canada has more than just one jurisdiction. This may be news to Deloitte and company, but in Quebec, we speak French. In Quebec, we also have our own tax return. We have the Public Curator and we have benefits from the Commission des normes, de l'équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, or CNESST. Quebec's unique characteristics must be taken into account, and we seriously doubt that this was done in the configuration of Cúram.
The public servants' report clearly states that the French-language interfaces displayed instructions in English, and their solution was to use Google Translate. A Radio-Canada article from June 2025 reported that, after encountering an error involving a missing form, a francophone public servant was presented with an error message so badly translated that it was unintelligible. The government unequivocally states that developing a solution in-house would have been too risky, but public servants and the government are in the best position to identify organizations and needs, especially for systems like these. They need internal expertise to develop them. We are moving toward a world where technologies play a key role in management, but this government constantly wants to outsource that to private companies.
In her memo to the Prime Minister in May 2022, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, wrote that institutional knowledge about custom system design, function and interdependencies have not been captured and communicated over time, meaning the Government of Canada is critically low in the expertise needed for legacy IT maintenance and replacement. That is why we want an independent public inquiry.
This past Monday, in a report on modernizing the pay system, the Auditor General of Canada noted that Phoenix 2.0, known as Dayforce, was going to cost $4.2 billion and that the estimate was not yet detailed and did not include the cost of transitioning all departments to the new system.
The Department of Public Works and Government Services announced in June 2025 that it was moving forward with a $350.6-million contract with Dayforce. However, the Auditor General's report says it emerged in December 2025 that the cost of the contract had already nearly doubled to $565.9 million, an increase of nearly $200 million. Phoenix, a project that was supposed to cost $309 million, ended up burning through $5 billion of taxpayer money. Combined with Dayforce, which is scheduled to launch in 2031, the government will have spent $9.2 billion, almost $1 billion per year.
The Auditor General noted that Public Services and Procurement Canada did not even calculate the difference between the operating costs for Phoenix and Dayforce. Nobody even knows if it will save us money. This is essentially why we are calling for an independent public inquiry.