There was a burning question for Diane Daly, a civil servant who worked on the ArriveCan app project. But when she appeared before a Commons committee Wednesday, MPs appeared to forget it.
The key question for Ms. Daly centred around a finding made by Auditor-General Karen Hogan in February. The two-person firm at the centre of the ArriveCan controversy, GCStrategies, had helped set the terms for bids on a $25-million contract. Those terms, according to the Auditor-General, gave GCStrategies an advantage in bidding. And they won the contract.
GCStrategies partner Kristian Firth was admonished by MPs for failing to answer questions, notably refusing to cough up the name of the civil servant he had dealt with on those bids. Mr. Firth was even called to the bar of the House of Commons in April – the first private citizen to get such a grilling since 1913. The name he eventually gave was Ms. Daly’s.
So when Ms. Daly appeared before the Commons public accounts committee, you’d expect the bid shenanigans to be a hot topic. It wasn’t.
MPs vote to obtain recording of ‘hostile’ investigative interview as part of ArriveCan study
Yet Ms. Daly herself talked about a meeting in 2020 where more senior officials told her it was common for IT contractors to be involved in setting the terms for bids, and that though she had never seen anything like it, she was too junior to question it. The MPs didn’t follow up with queries.
To be fair, it’s possible that the MPs around the committee didn’t really grasp what Ms. Daly was telling them. She spoke in thick Bureaucratese, with phrases such as “the PG6 of TBIPS trained me on the formatting of documents.”
Conservatives on the committee were far more interested in an allegation that Ms. Daly levelled – that superiors in the department where she now works, Public Services and Procurement Canada, pressed her in late 2023 to give false testimony that would pin the blame on two of her former bosses at Canada Border Services Agency, Anthony Utano and Cameron MacDonald.
Ms. Daly even testified that she had “proof” that PSPC superiors had intimidated her, in a recording she made of a conversation with senior director Tom von Schoenberg and a director-general, Lysane Bolduc.
Diane Daly testifies on Aug. 7.Supplied
But the quotes she read from the recording didn’t say anything about falsifying testimony. They appeared to be snippets of a conversation where Ms. Bolduc told Ms. Daly she was expected to agree to be interviewed by CBSA investigators trying to get to the bottom of the ArriveCan debacle. Ms. Daly had previously refused, citing a health issue.
In fact, Ms. Daly quoted Ms. Bolduc offering to have a senior official attend with her “to make sure you don’t feel like, I don’t know, like fish in a crocodile pond when you’re interviewed by the CBSA.”
None of it sounded like pressure to give false testimony. It sounded like pressure to co-operate with the ArriveCan investigation – something a public servant should be expected to do.
In the meantime, the key question – about a bidding process that was bent to give GCStrategies an advantage – was forgotten.
Ms. Daly did provide good reasons why she isn’t responsible for it. She was a mid-level employee at the CBSA with no expertise in IT, no access to procurement systems, and no authority to issue contracts. And she testified that she doesn’t recall discussing contract requirements with Mr. Firth.
But she also told MPs that she once attended a meeting that included her executive director – Mr. Utano – and a senior director from Public Services and Procurement Canada, where the latter told her it was “common” for IT procurement officials to ask suppliers to suggest the terms of bids.
“I’ve never encountered this in the private sector or the federal public service,” she testified. But she added she couldn’t question it. “Asking policy or legal teams about the senior director’s instructions would have been seen as insubordination,” she said.
None of the MPs asked the name of the senior director. Ms. Daly testified that if Mr. Firth sent her information about technical requirements for a bid, she would have passed it on to others at CBSA. The MPs didn’t ask their names.
The issue about how and why officials drafted a tender to give GCStrategies an advantage on a $25-million contract was passed over. The committees of MPs looking into ArriveCan are still finding the answers elusive, and this time, they forgot the question.