QUESTION PERIOD — Public Services and Procurement
Procurement Process
June 10, 2025
Government leader, just this morning, the Auditor General once again released a scathing report on the federal government’s procurement practices with GC Strategies and the whole ArriveCAN fiasco, citing failures of accountability, oversight and risk management that left Canadians exposed to waste and security breaches. Notably, the Auditor General did not include any recommendations saying that the problem isn’t with the existing procurement rules but rather with the federal government’s failure to simply abide by them.
Senator Gold, it is a very simple question: What assurances will the Carney government give Canadians in this chamber that, going forward, this type of fiasco will not happen again?
This government has made a commitment to Canadians to focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of government operations, focusing on results, and it will continue to use its best efforts with the public service to deliver on that promise to Canadians.
Senator Gold, nearly half of the current cabinet is made up of former ministers who were involved in this fiasco in the first place and who were closely associated under this audit, including Anita Anand, who was then Minister of Public Services and Procurement, and many others. How can your government credibly persuade Canadians and this chamber that this is not business as usual and that the procurement process will be conducted in an ethical, transparent way moving forward under the leadership of Mark Carney?
Again, leaving aside the issues where firms have been barred — in some cases, for seven years — because of practices that were deemed unacceptable and much debated, the Auditor General’s report made it clear that these were the aggregation of a huge number of small decisions made not at the ministerial level but within various departments, and the government is determined to do better and will continue to work to that end.
