SAAQclic: Legault also received incorrect figures on costs

Incorrect figures regarding the cost of the SAAQclic project were provided to Premier François Legault one month after the disastrous launch of the new platform on February 20, 2023. His office said it had a figure of $455 million. The document returned to him by the team led by Karl Malenfant, who headed the project, indicated a budget of $458 million authorized by the board of directors of the Société d’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ).

The attorney for the Gallant Commission, who was finishing his questioning of the architect of SAAQclic on Wednesday in Montreal, Alexandre Thériault-Marois, reminded him that he himself had already signed a $45.7 million amendment to this contract and that, beyond the contract itself, the cost of the project had already reached $682 million.

The platform was not ready

On the last day of his testimony, the architect of the SAAQclic project admitted from the outset that the platform was not ready when it was launched on February 20, 2023, as failures were piling up. “If I had received different signals from my teams, we would have done things differently. It’s really a domino effect, and no one would have wanted that. It’s unacceptable, that’s for sure,” said Malenfant.

Initially, the project was to be launched in December to take advantage of the two-week holiday period when the Société de l’assurance automobile (SAAQ) is operating at a slower pace. At the end of November, however, four of the 20 teams working on the project indicated that they were not ready.

It was not until the end of January that the parties involved declared themselves ready, even though “going beyond February 15 is problematic because it would mean closing the SAAQ during a busy period,” said Malenfant. However, he could not wait another year, as it would have cost at least $100 million more to keep all the teams in place.

No “day in the life”

Tens of thousands of tests at multiple levels had been carried out, but a final stage of testing that Malenfant wanted to carry out, known as “day in the life,” which involved a parallel simulation of the new system alongside the existing system when processing customer requests in branches, was not included in the bid. “It had been removed from the bid, but I insisted on it,” he said.

The supplier, LGS (a subsidiary of IBM), “refuses to commit to it,” explains the former vice president of information technology at the SAAQ. “We could have done it at a service point, doubling the staff for each customer, two employees, one with the new kit, the other with the old kit. That would have been a more robust strategy.”

In fact, Malenfant said a little later in his testimony, “I would have liked to see the project frozen (at the stage it had reached) in April 2022. But that’s not what happened. Changes were made and imposed on me. I would have liked a six-month freeze to run tests.”

Despite everything, the postponed launch is taking place and “I know there will be bugs, that I will be the lightning rod, but not that much,” he says. And the alliance formed by SAP and LGS suppliers is demanding an additional payment of $5.5 million to compensate for the launch delay.

Hundreds of bugs

The result of this launch will eventually be complete gridlock at SAAQ service points, as hundreds of bugs are discovered and cause multiple headaches for the SAAQ, but the problems began with the first attempt to go live on Monday, February 20. “My life changed at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning,” said Malenfant, because the planned launch did not happen due to an error by an IT specialist who did not put SAAQclic online, but rather a test version.

The next day, “we started to see the lights go down” because the servers did not have enough power, even though they should have, which meant that certain processes were requiring too much power and needed to be identified.

LGS attempts to withdraw

The problems continued for weeks, and three months later, Malenfant’s contact at IBM, Michel Dumas, told him that the three-month post-implementation period stipulated in the contract had ended and that he would begin reducing his teams, which angered Malenfant.

“I’m really angry. I haven’t slept in three months,” he said. He argued that even though the three-month stabilization period stipulated in the contract had ended, “we can see that we are not yet stabilized.” Indeed, a table shows that at that time, there were still more than 370 problems causing downtime or degradation.

Malenfant admits that the SAAQ has considered suing LGS, “but we have to keep the business running,” and taking legal action against the supplier would therefore be risky.

After a brief cross-examination by the SAAQ’s lawyer, Commissioner Gérard Gallant gave the floor to Malenfant, asking him to speak freely if he felt he had anything to add.

Malenfant’s plea

He began by saying that when he entered the public sector, he was surprised by “the government’s view that time is not important. What matters are the processes.” What takes a year in the private sector takes two in the public sector because of the many constraints that must be managed. “The state is a long, quiet river, but there are a lot of piranhas,” he said.

He also pointed out that the public sector—like the labour market as a whole—is grappling with a shortage of information technology talent, which is causing delays to the point where “technological debts are really increasing in the Quebec government.” But after the colossal effort required by the SAAQclic project, “the 500 people who contributed deserved at least congratulations. They worked evenings and weekends. They sacrificed their health and weren’t even thanked.”

“I’m radioactive”

Finally, he presented the results of a large-scale study on the costs of 16,000 major projects, demonstrating that, of all projects, those involving information technology present the most extreme risk of cost overruns, far ahead of all other types of projects.

In closing, he left the commissioner with this question about his counterpart at LGS, Michel Dumas, who was appointed vice president of the CNESST in November 2024 by the same government that called the project a fiasco: “Why does my counterpart have the right to return as vice president, but I am radioactive? That’s my reality today. I’m radioactive.”

Dumas was expected to appear before the commission in the afternoon.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews