Senator Poirier: Could you also then inquire as to whether there are other contracts like this waiting to be discovered? You can provide assurance to Canadian taxpayers that there are no other contracts also being withheld by your government?

Senator Dagenais: Delays and bureaucracy are two factors that sometimes slow down the procurement of equipment for our Armed Forces. Those delays have cost Canadian taxpayers a fortune since this government came to power. Why doesn’t Canada have a procurement department exclusively for Department of Defence requirements, like Britain does, with experts who know what they’re doing, instead of sometimes granting contracts to consultants?

Senator Quinn: Thank you, minister. As someone who has been involved in many contracts in government, I’ll come back to examples in other jurisdictions where the lowest bidder and highest bidder are put aside, they look at the average, and anybody that is qualified can be awarded the contract at the average or below.

Can the government not look at other jurisdictions to see how they reduced the risk of underbidding in order to win the contract and then catching up with extras and work arisings? It’s a very specific question.

[Translation]

Hon. Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Services and Procurement: You’re absolutely right about how important confidence is, and that’s why the skilled and experienced public servants at the Canada Border Services Agency, the CBSA, are currently reviewing that contract. It was a complex contract. It includes several dozen contracts and it was complex for all kinds of reasons. Many of those contracts had nothing to do with developing the software; they were for providing advice to public servants or Canadians. We know that 125,000 Canadians had to cross the border every day, and many of them were people who had to bring prescription drugs, food and essential goods into the country. The CBSA’s experts are currently reviewing many components of that contract, and we have confidence in them.

Hon. Rose-May Poirier: Thank you, minister, for being here. Minister, the Trudeau government never proactively disclosed that consulting firm Accenture is running the Canada Emergency Business Account, or CEBA, loan program for small businesses. Accenture received contracts worth at least $208 million. These contracts were kept from parliamentarians and from the Canadian taxpayers, and were revealed to The Globe and Mail through access to information.

As the procurement minister, do you believe this procurement was open and transparent? Could you also tell us the current total of these contracts?

Hon. Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Services and Procurement: Thank you, that’s a great question. The answer will come from my colleague at the Canada Border Services Agency, or CBSA, the agency that needed to design, implement and support that application. In that $54 million to which you referred, there is a series of contracts whose services and value went well beyond the design of the application itself. It was essential, as we said earlier, to make it possible for tens of thousands of Canadians to cross the border at a time during which it was also important to protect the health and safety of millions of Canadians.

Hon. Marie-Françoise Mégie: Hello, minister. Earlier, you answered Senator Gerba’s question about the content of your mandate letter, which talks about 5% of the total value of federal contracts being held by Indigenous businesses.

I did not quite understand whether you set any targets for Black communities, but you will need to have targets in order to measure these communities’ progress and determine whether the objectives have been met.

I am not sure whether you mentioned targets for these communities.