Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I cannot—

Government Operations committee  We do 10,000 contractual activities a year.

Government Operations committee  It's in the tens. Probably less than a hundred would require ministerial approval.

Government Operations committee  That is correct. In the case of ArriveCAN, of the 31 contracts that we put in place, I believe only three actually required executive approval. The rest were within the actual—

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, it is true that in the early days of COVID there were not many suppliers for many commodities, so we did have to enter into sole-source contracts. We do, as a course of action, have price verification when we do sole-source contracts. Maybe I'll turn to Mr. Ozmutlu to explain the work that we do in sole-sourcing to validate pricing and to do price certification.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I am not recalling briefings that I participated in. I'm not aware of any that Minister Jaczek was involved in.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, at the time, when a lot of these early procurements were going on for ArriveCAN, the focus, certainly in the early days of the pandemic, was on acquiring PPE. It was about getting vaccines, tests and testing services, and—

Government Operations committee  I believe she would have seen some products, such as a number of the contracts that would have been done under COVID authorities, but the initial contracts—

Government Operations committee  —that were put in place with GC Strategies predate Minister Jaczek.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, we currently have a number of supply arrangements and methods of supply to which GC Strategies is currently a member. When a requirement comes in, under the rules, in some cases the contracting officer is required to go to every qualified supplier on those instruments and ask for a proposal.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, these instruments have been put in competitively. Many firms have bid on these and have spent time to get on these arrangements. I'm not familiar with the full details, but I can imagine that a requirement came in for services under this instrument, and our procurement officers would have administered the instrument as per the rules.

Government Operations committee  As I tried to explain before, it's that these contracts are ultimately about IT professionals' doing work. Those IT professionals have very unique skills, very sought-after skills. In many cases, in the competitive process, these firms are very challenged to find available resources who will be able to come and do the work for the Government of Canada.

Government Operations committee  We look at the scope at a very high level, particularly with respect to these instruments, because we need to make sure that there are different streams within the TBIPS and we need to make sure that the scope of work aligns with the appropriate stream. Once contracts are bid and proposals and task authorizations are put forward, we make sure that the actual work is aligned with the stream that was initially awarded when we awarded the contract.

Government Operations committee  Maybe I'll turn to my colleagues. My understanding with that piece of work is that the key focus was the task authorization and whether it was aligned with Coradix's or Dalian's requirement to provide IT services. Were the IT services on the task authorization aligned with the scope of IT services?

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I'll take that back to see what we can do in terms of presenting information about the compensation of public servants. I believe some of it's public, but I will take it back in terms of what—