Public Accounts committee  I can't comment on whether it's common practice. I can tell you that we saw it in some of the samples we looked at where the contract called for 10 years or more of experience and the individual who performed the work was not that way. But there is a mechanism in place in the pub

Public Accounts committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, I should have finished. There was a second contract awarded to GC Strategies on June 29, 2020.

Public Accounts committee  It was related to, obviously, the second one, the one that was issued on June 29. It was, again, a non-competitive contract. There were three non-competitive contracts issued to GC Strategies before the competitive process took place.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  The concern was raised between the first non-competitive contract and the second one, based on the times.

Public Accounts committee  The email we're referring to was in May 2020. The first contract was awarded to GC Strategies under a non-competitive process on April 8, 2020. Then the application was launched on April 29.

Public Accounts committee  During the pandemic, the secretary of the Treasury Board Secretariat sent a letter to the public service to say that people could be a little more flexible with the usual rules, because of the pandemic and the need to react quickly. However, the letter also made it very clear tha

Public Accounts committee  With respect to arrangements resulting from a non-competitive process, Public Services and Procurement Canada signed contracts or specifications that were not clear enough. In my opinion, this does not comply with policy. Signing a document is indeed taking responsibility. That's

Public Accounts committee  I think ideas like that are already outlined in the procurement policy and in the supply manual that Public Services and Procurement Canada has out there. I would tell you that every department or agency should have its own procurement group or directorate that has a challenge

Public Accounts committee  I think it comes down to the accountability of the party actually entering into the contractual obligation. In this case, it would have been the Canada Border Services Agency. They ultimately are accountable for the decisions that they made. I think the more you funnel everythin

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you again for inviting us to discuss our report on ArriveCAN, which we released last week, on February 12, 2024. I would like to acknowledge that this meeting is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. This audit ex

Public Accounts committee  No, we didn't set out to look at what other countries may have done when it came to similar types of apps to control their border measures. Border measures were very different in different countries or may have changed at different times. We felt that it was important to focus on

Public Accounts committee  Is that directed to me?

Public Accounts committee  Here we were looking at the whole time between the development and the launch of the ArriveCAN app, which was in early 2020, all the way to January 2023. That's a few years' time. The assessment that was done by the Public Health Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency at

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure that I could speak to a best practice. I think that it was very reasonable at the beginning of the pandemic to recognize that there was surge capacity that was needed. There was so much going on, if we put ourselves back to early 2020, that it was reasonable to go t