Thank you so much. It's nice to visit this committee today and substitute for my good colleague Blake Desjarlais.
This is for the Office of the Procurement Ombudsman.
Concerning is right. Your department's report on emergency procurement highlighted the common challenges to procurement and services in an emergency such as COVID-19, as we are currently witnessing.
By the way, before I go on, I want to highlight the good work of my NDP colleague Gord Johns, who brought forward the motion to commission the report. As we know, it has shed tremendous light on many of the issues being discussed today and certainly all over the news. We know this was an extremely important step for what we're doing today, which is to get more clarity around what happened with ArriveCAN.
Circling back, the Auditor General, when bringing forth this report, commented, “An emergency does not mean that all the rules go out the window, and that departments and agencies are no longer required to document their decisions and keep complete and accurate records.” This is really troubling and very concerning.
In your department's report, you identified certain steps in a national emergency that the government has to take. There's a need for flexibility, centralizing, and ultimately relying on non-competitive contracting to save time and resources. However, the Auditor General is absolutely on point here. An emergency does not mean a disregard for rules and accountability. This is troubling.
Was the non-competitive process justified in this situation, when it was done so poorly and resulted in a heightened lack of transparency and a waste of resources?