SAAQclic inquiry: executive says she was kept out of the loop of IT project

An executive at the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) whose role included liaising with ministers’ offices testified that she was repeatedly kept out of the loop regarding the digital transformation project, SAAQclic.

The SAAQ’s director of government relations, Nadia Fournier, appeared Thursday morning before the Gallant Commission, which is investigating the IT project known as CASA, which includes SAAQclic.

She explained that communications sent to ministers’ offices concerning CASA were largely handled by SAAQ senior management. Unlike with other projects, Fournier was less involved and instead acted as a liaison.

“It was a file that was really driven by senior management. My role was still more minor compared to other files where I am really involved,” said the civil servant.

According to her testimony, she sends documents on CASA to the offices without double-checking the information — which is sometimes incorrect — that comes mainly from the company’s information technology team.

Fournier reiterated that she often relied on her superiors and assumed that the data had already been validated by the various managers. She did not have the arguments to challenge management, she said, adding that CASA was “all Greek” to her when she arrived at the SAAQ in 2021.

Fournier said she did not participate in certain meetings where SAAQclic’s budgets and timelines were discussed with ministers, members of their cabinets, or government representatives.

Some documents relating to budgets were never sent to her, such as one in 2022 that mentioned a $222-million shortfall for the project.

“Is it normal that, at the very least, you are not even copied or included in the loop with everything that is sent to government authorities?” asked Commissioner Denis Gallant.

“I would have preferred to be involved in all the exchanges, to have my own file, to be able to follow it and have a better understanding of it. I’m not a filing cabinet in real life,” replied Fournier. “I’m less likely to miss something when I’m aware of it.”

She first heard about possible additional costs in hallway discussions. When she learned of the signing of a first $45-million overrun to the consortium’s contract in the fall of 2022, Fournier assumed that SAAQ senior management had informed the office of the Minister of Transportation.

“It wasn’t my job to break that news,” said the director, who specified that she had not been asked by her superiors to inform the minister’s office.

A few months later, after the rollout of SAAQclic, she received a presentation on the costs. She forwarded the document to the office of the Minister of Transportation, Geneviève Guilbault, even though it did not contain the new cost associated with the contract.

“I assumed that the content was correct and that it had been discussed,” said Fournier.

‘We hired experts’

On Thursday afternoon, the commission began hearing from Jean-Philippe McKenzie, vice-president of secure access to the SAAQ road network, who is responsible for service points.

At the meeting where the green light was given for the platform’s deployment in January 2023, everyone around the table was on the same page, McKenzie said.

The consortium’s leaders and an American specialist invited to the management committee meeting were optimistic, according to McKenzie.

On the ground, some say that everything will be far from perfect. “Are we announcing the problems we’re going to experience on February 20?” asked the commission’s attorney, Alexandre Thériault-Marois.

“My position with regard to these three experts who deployed projects for which they were given a large contract: we didn’t hire labor, we hired expertise,” McKenzie said. “Their weight for a VP of business has a huge impact.”

“If they had presented us with the challenges we experienced, the way we experienced them, there would have been no deployment. Because, for me, the trust would not have been there,” he added.

His testimony is set to continue on Friday morning.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews