Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll start, but I'll be quick and leave my colleague a couple of minutes as well. I think it was always the case that potential bidders had the opportunity to pose questions about their request for proposals to get clarification, and in some cases the go

Public Accounts committee  We have a few other countries that we regularly partner with. The U.S. and the U.K. are two of the most common. We are now looking at other jurisdictions, as we look to augment our training and our documentation, to see if there are things we can borrow from to better improve tha

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, maybe I can start with a quick answer. In terms of the federal contractors program, from a procurement perspective—the member mentioned the size requirement for the companies—bidders do have to certify that they're in compliance. As was mentioned earlier, Labour has

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll start. If my colleagues want to add in, please do. It has been around for a while, for sure. It came out of the private sector, and it is not just a procurement methodology. It is a project management methodology, but obviously procurement is a big

Public Accounts committee  I met with the industry association, I think just last week, and we had a really good discussion on this point. We're all in agreement that, yes, the “agile” word is getting thrown around, but we need to work together to make sure that we all understand or are speaking the same l

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it's early days, and we can certainly do better. I think one of the key things we've done recently is work with our client departments to help give both procurement and the client folks an assessment tool: Is it a good candidate for agile? That's your first question. As Mr.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. I would say that it's neither one nor the other. In agile procurement, a competitive process is used to select one supplier. In most cases, several suppliers are used. The goal is to divide a large project into several small parts. In fact, a number

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. In the case of the two examples the Auditor General used in her report, the NextGen initiative for human resources and the benefits delivery modernization program, a number of resellers are participating in the project. For NextGen, there are three: S

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Same answer: Anything that goes to Treasury Board for approval requires a gender-based analysis, and contracts of this size or projects of this size go through Treasury Board, so the procurement piece goes through us as well.

Public Accounts committee  It is critical to upgrade the analytics function to effectively add sophistication to our work. What I would say about our experience to date, as referenced in the AG report, is that it was difficult to do good analytics because of inconsistent data. An easy example here, just fo

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it's CanadaBuys. A big part of that is the e-procurement software system that's been launched, as well as the portal for suppliers, but yes.

Public Accounts committee  There's already centralization to the degree that PSPC and Shared Services Canada do run the procurements for large-dollar procurements. What this does, though, is make the tools and the process more standardized and more automated to allow us to better collect data and also make

Public Accounts committee  I think I may have to turn to one of my colleagues on this, maybe Mr. Flack, but, if not, I'm happy to get back to the member, Madam Chair, with a follow-up on that front. Maybe I should let Lorenzo take a shot at that first.

Public Accounts committee  I am, and we've had questions about this program in the past. It's not a program managed by PSPC. That's why I'm struggling, in fact, with where to direct the question. I believe ESDC has responsibility for it, but my colleague Mr. Flack may be able to clarify that.

Public Accounts committee  I'll come back to that if they wish, Madam Chair.