What we've learned from the inquiry into the SAAQclic fiasco
Consultants' hourly rates rose from $82 to $350, according to former SAAQ auditor
It's been a month since a public inquiry was launched to shed light on the chaotic rollout of an online platform for Quebec's automobile insurance board and the eye-popping $500-million cost overrun it came with.
The February 2023 launch of the SAAQclic online platform faced a series of major failures and sparked a customer service crisis.
These problems were highlighted in a scathing report by the auditor general in February 2025. After the report's release, a Coalition Avenir Québec minister stepped down.
The platform was intended to centralize most of the services from the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ). Instead, users across the province struggled to access and navigate it, and for weeks, frustrated drivers lined up in the cold outside SAAQ offices as technical issues dragged on.
The public inquiry — presided over by Denis Gallant and known as the Gallant commission — began on April 24.
There have been several revelations, including a fourfold increase in the hourly rates of consultants.
If you missed the past month's hearings, streamed online, here are some of the key takeaways.
Several calls for tenders ended with a single bidder
Prosecutors for the Gallant commission discovered that many tender calls related to the CASA project — the SAAQ's broad IT modernization project that included the SAAQclic platform — ended with a single bidder.
Martin Lapierre, former internal auditor at the SAAQ, told the commission that several people who won calls for tenders for "strategic resources" had professional ties with Karl Malenfant, the former vice-president of the SAAQ's digital experience and the project director for CASA.
Commission prosecutor Alexandre Thériault-Marois cited the example of Madeleine Chagnon who knew Malenfant because she had worked with him at Hydro-Québec and at RD3, a private IT solutions firm. In 2015, in the early days of the CASA project, she was the only bidder deemed compliant with the criteria for a SAAQ contract.
Lapierre said he was astonished to find a clause in the call for tenders stating that the successful bidder had to "hold a master's degree, which could not be offset by years of relevant experience."
"I haven't seen that often … It was peculiar," he testified.
Lapierre explained during the session that he reported this to his superiors, who assured him that all the rules surrounding the call for tenders had been followed to the letter.
Consultants' hourly rates rose from $82 to $350, says former auditor
The commission also revealed that employees from external firms working on the online platform were promoted from "integrators" to "leading experts" during the course of the project.
As a result, according to former SAAQ internal auditor Martin Després, their wages more than quadrupled from $82 to $350 per hour.
According to the contract between the SAAQ and a group commonly referred to as "the Alliance" — made up of the companies LGS and SAP — there were 10,793 hours of work planned over five years for these "leading experts." But less than two and a half years later, nearly 35,000 hours had already been billed under this employee profile.
Després said it constituted an overrun of around $3 million. He told the commission that he had examined the tasks performed by the employees who had received these salary increases and, according to him, "there was no significant difference" in their work.
He said he questioned his superiors and learned that the decision "came from above," from Malenfant's office.
Between 2017 and 2019, Després and his team compared the hours billed by consultants hired by the SAAQ with the time they actually spent at the head office, as stipulated in their contract.
The result: a gap of more than 12,500 hours, which Després said cost Quebec's automobile insurance board approximately $1.5 million.
Després said he reported these results to his superiors. An internal investigation was then launched.
The findings of the investigation surprised him.
"We were told [the gap in hours] was remote work that was approved," said Després.
Employees, with some exceptions, were required to work in the head office. All remote work had to be approved by the managers.
"With all the checks we had done beforehand, we found it strange that all that remote work was approved afterward," said Després.
He added that managers at the SAAQ asked the auditors to destroy the documents related to their investigation, which he says he and his team refused to comply with.
A CEO 'from another planet' with no digital experience
During his testimony, former SAAQ board chair Konrad Sioui recounted how Denis Marsolais found himself at the helm of the automobile insurance board in January 2022, just over a year before the rollout of the digital platform.
At the time, CEO Nathalie Tremblay had just retired. In the middle of the interview process, Sioui said he received a call from the Secrétariat aux emplois supérieurs, which is a government agency that the province consults with when hiring people for senior-ranking positions.
Sioui said he was told that they had found the right person: Marsolais, a longtime government official.
"We felt that the political pressure was too heavy. They should have let us do our job. We had excellent candidates. But... it's the political side that takes over and says: 'Look, this is the one we want, and that's that,'" said Sioui.
Although Marsolais was described as "willing" and "ready to roll up his sleeves," he was also "from another planet," according to Sioui.
Board of directors knew the project had 'all the flaws'
François Geoffrion, who sat on the SAAQ's board of directors from 2013 to 2022, told the Gallant commission the board knew that the digital transformation project was "risky" and had "all the flaws," even before the call for tenders was launched.
"We screwed up twice," said Geoffrion. "In the needs assessment and during the rollout."
According to him, several warning signs were flashing red from the very beginning of the project, including the SAAQ's lack of technological maturity, insufficient specialized resources, and not enough managers to oversee the project.
Additionally, documents submitted to the commission suggest that SAAQ administrators, including the chair of the board at the time, were made aware as early as October 2020 of the likelihood that the rollout of the website would face cost overruns, according to documents submitted to the commission.
The commission resumed Monday and the inquiry's report is due by Sept. 30, 2025.
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Based on reporting by Radio-Canada’s Jean-François Thériault and La Presse Canadienne