SAAQclic fiasco: Karl Malenfant denies having given contracts to his friends

Karl Malenfant, former vice-president of information technology at the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ), denies having given generous contracts to his friends.

“Not at all. That’s a completely false hypothesis,” he said during a close interrogation at the Gallant commission investigating the SAAQclic fiasco on Wednesday.

His testimony was highly anticipated, as Malenfant is one of the only ones to have led the SAAQclic project from its conception to its catastrophic launch in February 2023.

The SAAQ’s failed digital shift is expected to cost at least $1.1 billion by 2027, which is $500 million more than anticipated, according to the Quebec Auditor General (VGQ) in its report published in February 2025.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Alexandre Thériault-Marois suggested that Malenfant had gathered around him “a small hard core” of friends who had “taken control” of the SAAQ’s computer project.

He adduced in evidence emails with a very familiar tone, in which Malenfant nicknamed the consultants Madeleine Chagnon and Louise Savoie “Mado” and “Loulou,” and in which there was even talk of a “pajama party” in Quebec City.

The two women would later obtain millions of dollars in contracts from the SAAQ.

According to Malenfant, a “pyjama party” in the world of technology refers to the launch of an IT project. He maintained that Chagnon and Savoie have never been personal friends.

However, on Oct. 4, 2013, Chagnon sent him an email entitled “Hello, my friend.”

She writes: “I am really looking forward to seeing you so that we can talk together both on a personal level and on all your new experience in society. I miss you, you know.”

Malenfant defended himself on Wednesday for having drafted calls for tenders so restrictive that only Chagnon and Savoie could win them.

“You have the right to restrict the market. (…) This is not illegal. (…) I wanted very high expertise,” he said, saying that he had been advised by ethicists and lawyers from the SAAQ.

The former VP has repeatedly accused Thériault-Marois of making “amalgams,” which seemed to annoy Commissioner Denis Gallant, who brought him to order by ordering him to limit his comments.

In another email filed in evidence, Malenfant wrote to Chagnon on May 1, 2015: “Hi accomplice! (…) I’m starting to find it interesting with you in governance, Louise in overall architecture and potentially our four friends. It’s starting to make an interesting little hard core.”

Confidence in Malenfant

Earlier in the day, former SAAQ CEO Nathalie Tremblay concluded two and a half days of testimony by saying that he trusted Malenfant until he left.

Does she still trust her former employee today? “I don’t have the necessary hindsight to answer this question,” she explained to the commission.

Tremblay said she “fell off (her) chair” at the catastrophic launch of SAAQclic in February 2023, about a year after her retirement.

“I was all alone in the kitchen with my husband and my dog. I said, “Will you tell me what just happened there?”

“I was stopped in the street by my neighbors who told me: ‘My god, you must be happy to be gone.’ And it made me cry, because I would have loved to go and help them,” she said.

The former senior civil servant said she was “worried” about what would happen next. “What leader is going to dare to undertake big projects, when we need them so much?”

She made several recommendations to the commission, including clarifying key concepts such as “the total cost of acquisition” and “expected benefits” of projects.

“Let’s be clear that it means the same thing for everyone,” she said, but called on Commissioner Gallant not to recommend in his report an addition of “controls.”

“When there are difficulties that arise, we tend to add more, more more, more more,” she lamented.

However, the government should develop its expertise in information technology in order to “reduce its vulnerability” to large technology firms, she said.

On June 18, Malenfant unsuccessfully requested participant status in the Gallant commission, which would have allowed him to cross-examine witnesses.

Since then, he has been posting numerous comments on social media criticizing the commission.

Malenfant also gave two lengthy interviews to Le Devoir and La Presse in which he defended his project tooth and nail.

“I can dismantle the (VGQ) report paragraph by paragraph,” he told La Presse.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews