Latest news with #DenisGallant
CTV News
3 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
SAAQclic: former employee defends integrity of tender process
Commissioner Denis Gallant of the Commission of Inquiry into the Management of the Modernisation of the Société de l'assurance automobile (SAAQ) IT Systems awaits the start of the public inquiry into the failures of the SAAQclic platform, under the watchful eye of chief prosecutor Simon Tremblay, in Montreal, on Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press) On Tuesday, a former employee of the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) defended the integrity of the tender process for the development of the SAAQclic platform, saying no one was subjected to undue pressure to select suppliers. Jean-Marc Perrotte testified before the Gallant Commission, which is investigating the failures of the Crown corporation's digital transformation. He was a member of the selection committee that recommended awarding the contract to the consortium formed by SAP and LGS in 2017. 'As a member of the selection committee, I never experienced any interference, either internally within the company or externally,' he said. 'And to my knowledge — you could ask them — I have not heard any rumours that anyone exerted any pressure on the seven of us to choose the alliance we chose.' The former employee worked on the SAAQ's IT project, known as CASA, after his involvement in the tendering process. He left the company to retire in July 2018. Last week, the commission revealed documents referring to 'an appearance of favouritism' and 'a perception of favouritism towards one alliance' among certain members of advisory committees. The purpose of the committees was to advise the selection committee on specific aspects of the bids received. Among the members of these committees were external consultants hired to prepare the tendering process. SAAQ executive Nicolas Vincent, who oversaw the advisory committees, testified on this subject last week. He said that 'a perception' emerged 'that those who had prepared the tender were favouring a solution from SAP,' the software provider. Perrotte was also a member of one of the advisory committees. He recalled the presence of external resources who took up more space and evaluated bids with lower scores than other committee members during a meeting. After reporting this situation to the SAAQ's contract management team, Perrotte said he never saw these external individuals again at subsequent meetings. This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on June 3, 2025.
CTV News
27-05-2025
- Business
- CTV News
SAAQclic: ex-IT boss ‘bulls-itted' senior management
Judge Denis Gallant of the Commission d'enquête sur la gestion de la modernisation des systèmes informatiques de la Société de l'assurance automobile (SAAQ) awaits the start of the public inquiry into the failure of the SAAQclic platform in Montreal on Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press) Senior management at the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) was 'bullshitted' by its IT boss as he defended an extra $222 million for the deployment of the SAAQclic platform, according to a former internal auditor. The former director of the SAAQ's internal audit department, Daniel Pelletier, continued his testimony on Tuesday before the Gallant commission, which is investigating the failures of the provincial Crown corporation. Pelletier revealed that the office of then Transport Minister François Bonnardel was informed in June 2022 of future cost overruns of $222 million. Newly appointed CEO of the SAAQ, Denis Marsolais, called a meeting with a representative of the minister's office to announce the extra cost, which represented 50 per cent of the cost of the initial contract with suppliers. The SAAQ's vice-president of information technology at the time, Karl Malenfant, was also present. According to Pelletier, the meeting did not go well. 'Things got out of hand in the minister's office,' he said. Pelletier said that he had warned Marsolais that presenting such an extra would not go down well in the minister's office and that 'it was going to be hot,' since the latter believes that the contract with the consortium is capped at $458 million, as reported to him by SAAQ senior management, Pelletier asserts. Pelletier questioned the justifications put forward by Malenfant, who is in charge of the SAAQclic project, to defend the additional expenses to the contract. In his view, the suggested additions did not actually exist. Pelletier recounted what he had said to Marsolais following his meeting with the minister's office: 'Denis, you're being bullshitted' by Karl Malenfant. 'I said it to him like that. A sort of cry from the heart," Pelletier told Commissioner Denis Gallant. Marsolais lost his job in April 2023 in the wake of the failed rollout of SAAQclic, which had caused huge lineups outside branches. The SAAQ's technological modernization project could cost a minimum of more than $1.1 billion by 2027, or $500 million more than expected, according to the Auditor General. A modified final bid The final offer from the firms responsible for developing the SAAQclic platform was already raising concerns a few weeks before it was signed. The selection committee for the call for tenders suggested revising or clarifying certain points in the contract before it was signed with the LGS-IBM-SAP alliance in March 2017. Among the concerns was the number of hours for technology integration, which had been reduced by 730,000 compared with the initial bid. Three years later, the consortium calculated that the project would ultimately require 2 million hours rather than 877,000. 'Somewhere in 2020, we were in the process of discussing the possibility of handing over nearly a million more,' recalled Pelletier. In 2017, Pelletier's team had not been informed of the changes made. However, while monitoring the tendering process, the former director remembers that some members of the selection committee were 'surprised' when they discovered the content of the second bid. The consultants' 'very high' hourly rate 'for the additional work reserve' was also a point to be checked against the initial proposal. It rose from $89 to $256. 'For the same work, the competitor proposed an hourly rate of $151,' the selection committee said. The committee also pointed out that the implementation of services for the delivery of permits and registrations on the platform would be done 'without simulation.' 'This implied that there would be no prior simulations or tests. We now understand that it would certainly have been useful,' Pelletier told Commissioner Gallant. Pelletier is due to be cross-examined on Wednesday morning. This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on May 27, 2025. By Frédéric Lacroix-Couture, The Canadian Press
CBC
26-05-2025
- Business
- CBC
What we've learned from the SAAQclic fiasco inquiry
Social Sharing It's been a month since a public inquiry was launched to shed light on the chaotic rollout of an online platform for Quebec's automobile insurance board and the eye-popping $500-million cost overrun it came with. The February 2023 launch of the SAAQclic online platform faced a series of major failures and sparked a customer service crisis. These problems were highlighted in a scathing report by the auditor general in February 2025. After the report's release, a Coalition Avenir Québec minister stepped down. The platform was intended to centralize most of the services from the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ). Instead, users across the province struggled to access and navigate it, and for weeks, frustrated drivers lined up in the cold outside SAAQ offices as technical issues dragged on. The public inquiry — presided by Denis Gallant and known as the Gallant commission — began on April 24. There have been several revelations, including a fourfold increase in the hourly rates of consultants. If you missed the past month's hearings, streamed online, here are some of the key takeaways. Several calls for tenders ended with a single bidder Prosecutors for the Gallant commission discovered that many tender calls related to the CASA project — the SAAQ's broad IT modernization project that included the SAAQclic platform — ended with a single bidder. Martin Lapierre, former internal auditor at the SAAQ, told the commission that several people who won calls for tenders for "strategic resources" had professional ties with Karl Malenfant, the former vice-president of the SAAQ's digital experience and the project director for CASA. Commission prosecutor Alexandre Thériault-Marois cited the example of Madeleine Chagnon who knew Malenfant because she had worked with him at Hydro-Québec and at RD3, a private IT solutions firm. In 2015, in the early days of the CASA project, she was the only bidder deemed compliant with the criteria for a SAAQ contract. Lapierre said he was astonished to find a clause in the call for tenders stating that the successful bidder had to "hold a master's degree, which could not be offset by years of relevant experience." "I haven't seen that often … It was peculiar," he testified. Lapierre explained during the session that he reported this to his superiors, who assured him that all the rules surrounding the call for tenders had been followed to the letter. SAAQclic inquiry reveals massive jumps in hourly wages, tailor-made calls for tender 3 days ago Duration 2:24 Consultants' hourly rates rose from $82 to $350, says former auditor The commission also revealed that employees from external firms working on the online platform were promoted from "integrators" to "leading experts" during the course of the project. As a result, according to former SAAQ internal auditor Martin Després, their wages more than quadrupled from $82 to $350 per hour. According to the contract between the SAAQ and a group commonly referred to as "the Alliance" — made up of the companies LGS and SAP — there were 10,793 hours of work planned over five years for these "leading experts." But less than two and a half years later, nearly 35,000 hours had already been billed under this employee profile. Després said it constituted an overrun of around $3 million. He told the commission that he had examined the tasks performed by the employees who had received these salary increases and, according to him, "there was no significant difference" in their work. He said he questioned his superiors and learned that the decision "came from above," from Malenfant's office. Between 2017 and 2019, Després and his team compared the hours billed by consultants hired by the SAAQ with the time they actually spent at the head office, as stipulated in their contract. The result: a gap of more than 12,500 hours, which Després said cost Quebec's automobile insurance board approximately $1.5 million. Després said he reported these results to his superiors. An internal investigation was then launched. The findings of the investigation surprised him. "We were told [the gap in hours] was remote work that was approved," said Després. Employees, with some exceptions, were required to work in the head office. All remote work had to be approved by the managers. "With all the checks we had done beforehand, we found it strange that all that remote work was approved afterward," said Després. He added that managers at the SAAQ asked the auditors to destroy the documents related to their investigation, which he says he and his team refused to comply with. A CEO 'from another planet' with no digital experience During his testimony, former SAAQ board chair Konrad Sioui recounted how Denis Marsolais found himself at the helm of the automobile insurance board in January 2022, just over a year before the rollout of the digital platform. At the time, CEO Nathalie Tremblay had just retired. In the middle of the interview process, Sioui said he received a call from the Secrétariat aux emplois supérieurs, which is a government agency that the province consults with when hiring people for senior-ranking positions. Sioui said he was told that they had found the right person: Marsolais, a longtime government official. "We felt that the political pressure was too heavy. They should have let us do our job. We had excellent candidates. But... it's the political side that takes over and says: 'Look, this is the one we want, and that's that,'" said Sioui. Although Marsolais was described as "willing" and "ready to roll up his sleeves," he was also "from another planet," according to Sioui. WATCH | How the SAAQclic fiasco led to a minister's resignation: Quebec minister resigns in wake of SAAQclic fiasco 3 months ago Duration 2:26 Board of directors knew the project had 'all the flaws' François Geoffrion, who sat on the SAAQ's board of directors from 2013 to 2022, told the Gallant commission the board knew that the digital transformation project was "risky" and had "all the flaws," even before the call for tenders was launched. "We screwed up twice," said Geoffrion. "In the needs assessment and during the rollout." According to him, several warning signs were flashing red from the very beginning of the project, including the SAAQ's lack of technological maturity, insufficient specialized resources, and not enough managers to oversee the project. Additionally, documents submitted to the commission suggest that SAAQ administrators, including the chair of the board at the time, were made aware as early as October 2020 of the likelihood that the rollout of the website would face cost overruns, according to documents submitted to the commission. The commission resumed Monday and the inquiry's report is due by Sept. 30, 2025.
CTV News
23-05-2025
- CTV News
‘Kinship' in contractual links for the SAAQ's digital shift
Judge Denis Gallant of the Commission d'enquête sur la gestion de la modernisation des systèmes informatiques de la Société de l'assurance automobile (SAAQ) awaits the start of the public inquiry into the failures of the SAAQ's digital shift, as Chief Prosecutor Simon Tremblay looks on, in Montreal, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Christinne Muschi / The Canadian Press)
Montreal Gazette
24-04-2025
- Automotive
- Montreal Gazette
Explainer: Public inquiry begins in SAAQclic scandal
Quebec Politics By A public inquiry into a digital modernization attempt by Quebec's auto insurance corporation that went half a billion dollars over budget and led to fewer people using its online services began Thursday in Montreal. Overseen by Denis Gallant, a municipal court judge, the commission will attempt to find out what actually happened as the budget ballooned for the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec's new software system, which includes an online portal for motorists, known as SAAQclic, whose launch has been widely described as a 'fiasco.' The scandal has already led to the resignation of a provincial cabinet minister and, as the inquiry begins, commissioner Gallant is defending himself from conflict of interest allegations made by opposition parties due to his past professional relationship with a senior provincial minister. What was the SAAQclic fiasco? In 2015, the SAAQ, which administers driver's licences, car registration and the public portion of auto insurance, began a program to modernize its digital systems, that included a platform known as SAAQclic, which allows people to renew driver's licences, make payments and book driving tests online. In the weeks before SAAQclic was rolled out in February 2023, the SAAQ reduced services for customers as data was transferred to the new software. But when it launched, motorists were unable to do even basic transactions online. At one point the system crashed completely, some users found documents they tried to download were blank, while others struggled to sign up at all — or had to wait for a code to come in the mail to create an account. That forced drivers to go to SAAQ offices, where many waited in line for hours. Is that it? It gets worse. Two years later, a report by Quebec's auditor general revealed that the digital transformation, known as the CASA program, had gone around $500 million over budget, with the final cost estimated to reach at least $1.1 billion by 2027. Despite the increased costs, the auditor general found that services at SAAQ counters are taking longer than before the new system was rolled out and that fewer drivers are using the SAAQclic platform than used the SAAQ's old online services. The auditor general also found that the SAAQ split a $222 million contract into smaller pieces to cover cost overruns into smaller pieces, so that not all of them would be included in a online database of government contracts. Following the damning auditor general's report, Éric Caire resigned as Quebec's minister of cybersecurity and digital affairs. While Caire denied he did anything wrong, reports have revealed that he issued a ministerial order allowing the SAAQ to circumvent normal rules in order to mask the $222 million contract. François Bonnardel, who was the minister of transportation when the platform was being created, has said he was lied to about the project, but Le Devoir has reported that Bonnardel attended a secret meeting with SAAQ executives in September 2021 where he was told the project was already more than $200 million over budget. Earlier this month, the Autorité des marchés publics, Quebec's public procurement authority, ordered the SAAQ to suspend all contracts related to the SAAQclic project for 30 days, though that suspension was lifted on Thursday. What is the commission of inquiry? The commission, which will begin hearing from witnesses on Monday, is intended to find out what caused the problems as the project was planned, contracts were awarded, the project went over budget and the SAAQclic platform was launched, Gallant said, and what SAAQ decision makers and Quebec cabinet ministers knew. 'We will find the truth, no matter the people or parties involved,' he said during his opening remarks. The commission, which will hold sessions in Montreal and Quebec City, is expected to begin with testimony related to the auditor general's report. A Sept. 30 deadline has been set for it final report, which will also include recommendations. While the commission has the power to compel witnesses to appear before it and to order documents to be produced, Gallant said several times that it is not a civil or criminal trial and is intended not to interfere with other investigations, or legal proceedings, that may take place. Gallant, who was a Charbonneau Commission prosecutor, said he deliberately looked for people who had worked at that inquiry — which ran from 2011 to 2015 and investigated corruption in the awarding of public construction contracts in Quebec — as he worked to quickly build an experienced team. What's the problem with that? Earlier this month, Liberal MNA Monsef Derraji said Gallant should recuse himself and the commission should start from scratch because Treasury Board President Sonia LeBel was the chief prosecutor at the Charbonneau Commission and may be called to testify about the SAAQclic fiasco. Opposition parties have also raised concerns about the relationship between commission chief investigator Robert Pigeon and LeBel's spouse, a former Sûreté du Québec agent, and the fact that the commission's secretary-general, Véronyck Fontaine, used to work closely with former SAAQ CEO Denis Marsolais. Gallant said Thursday that everyone at the commission, including himself, who worked with LeBel will fill out a conflict of interest declaration and that any meetings or testimony involving her will be handled by other investigators, prosecutors and lawyers. He said the same process will be applied if there are any other potential conflicts of interest.
