The Cost You Cannot See, Part 1: The Pattern Quebec Keeps Repeating
Large public technology projects keep failing the same way — and Quebec's own watchdog has now said so in writing.
Large public technology projects in Quebec keep failing in the same ways, across different governments and different parties. That is no longer a claim made by critics. It is the written conclusion of the province’s own oversight bodies, set down in two reports in the space of a single year.
The question this series asks
When a public technology project runs hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, arrives years late, or is quietly rebuilt at a price the public cannot find, two questions follow. The first is what went wrong. The second, and the harder one, is why the same thing keeps going wrong, and why the bodies created to prevent it keep arriving after the money is gone.
This series puts those questions on the public record. Part One sets out the pattern and the evidence that the system itself has now named it. Part Two examines SAAQclic, the failure Quebec has already studied in depth. Part Three examines Votre Santé, a newer case where the failure is not only a cost overrun but a cost placed beyond public view.
The pattern
Quebec’s large public IT failures are not a series of unrelated accidents. They share a small set of causes that recur regardless of who is in power.
A reliance on outside vendors that hollows out the state’s own capacity to build and manage technology Procurement processes that reduce or remove competition, often binding the state to a single supplier with few ways out Internal warnings that are absorbed and neutralized rather than acted on Oversight bodies that arrive after the money has already been spent An absence of personal consequence when a project fails
The shape is consistent. A worthy public objective, a modern licensing system or a digital health record, is pursued through a mechanism that is technical, spread across several agencies, and shielded from ordinary view. The people paying cannot readily see what their money is buying. By the time anyone with authority looks closely, the cost is fixed and the responsibility has dispersed.
How Quebec built an oversight system that arrives too late
The remedy for this was named more than a decade ago. In 2015 the Charbonneau Commission delivered its final report on corruption and mismanagement in public contracting. Among its central recommendations were stronger independent oversight of procurement and real protection for those who raise warnings from inside the system.
In 2017 Quebec acted on that first recommendation and created the Autorité des marchés publics, the AMP, as a neutral and independent body charged with watching over public contracts and the sound management of public funds. The architecture was built. What the cases since then show is that it was built downstream of the decisions that matter, able to document failures after they occur rather than prevent them before the money is committed.
The watchdog’s own verdict
On May 14, 2026, that same body delivered the clearest statement yet that the problem is structural. At the request of the President of the Treasury Board, the AMP reviewed how public bodies award and run the contracts behind their digital-transformation projects. It examined eleven projects carried out between 2010 and 2025 and drew on academic studies, public audits, and meetings with technology firms and government bodies.
Its conclusion was not narrow. The AMP issued twenty findings and nine recommendations, identifying significant gaps in governance, project management, oversight, expertise, and accountability. It found that these gaps contribute directly to overruns in cost, schedule, and scope, and that they expose some projects to a high risk of outright failure. The Authority was explicit that the twenty findings describe interrelated problems that cannot be corrected by isolated or one-off measures.
This matters for one reason above all. The case that Quebec’s oversight of public technology is too weak no longer has to be argued by anyone outside government. The body created after Charbonneau to be the watchdog has now made that case itself, in writing, and addressed it to the government.
The AMP’s first recommendation points to where the repair has to begin. It calls for the central governance of public digital projects to be repositioned within the Treasury Board secretariat, and for the expertise of the state’s own digital ministry to be strengthened and better used. The Authority’s chief executive noted that the government already holds internal technology expertise, but that it must be mobilized far more effectively if public digital projects are to succeed.
A second verdict in the same year
The AMP report did not stand alone. Three months earlier, on February 16, 2026, the Commission Gallant delivered its final report on SAAQclic, the failed modernization of the province’s automobile insurance services. After 75 days of hearings and more than 120 witnesses, Judge Denis Gallant produced a 586-page report with twelve findings and twenty-six recommendations.
The commission found that the agency had misled Parliament, ministers, and their offices for the better part of a decade about the true state and cost of the project. It found that the program had been bound for years to a single supplier with few exit routes, which it described as an open door to cost overruns. The original 2017 contract, worth 458 million dollars over ten years, reached roughly 1.1 billion. Among its recommendations, the commission urged Quebec to clean up the management of its technology contracts and to improve the transparency of accountability across the state.
Two independent reviews, in a single year, reaching the same structural conclusion from opposite ends. One looked across eleven projects and found systemic gaps. The other looked deeply into one project and found a decade of concealment and a procurement structure built to drift. They describe the same machine.
The public cost
The cost of this pattern is not only the dollars in any single overrun, though those are large. It is the repetition. A state that loses the ability to build and oversee its own technology pays the same premium again and again, to outside vendors, on projects the public struggles to follow and cannot easily price. It is the service failures that land on citizens when these systems are launched before they are ready. And it is the slow erosion of accountability, because when responsibility is spread across agencies and consultants, no single person answers for the result.
What must change
The remedies are not mysterious, and they are not new. They were set out after Charbonneau and they have been proven in other jurisdictions. They begin with the AMP’s own first recommendation, that central governance of public digital projects be strengthened and placed where it can shape decisions before the money is committed, and that the state rebuild and use its own expertise rather than defaulting to outside suppliers. They extend to genuine protection for those who warn from inside, to procurement that preserves competition, and to accountability that does not evaporate when a project fails.
The authority to make these changes sits with the government and the Treasury Board. The recommendations are already on the public record. The open question is implementation.
Why now
There is a narrow window to put these questions where they cannot be ignored. A general election is set for October 5, 2026. At the same time, several oversight processes touching these failures remain active, including a continuing criminal investigation arising from SAAQclic and audits still underway in the health technology file that Part Three examines. The reports have been written. The evidence is public. What remains is whether the people with the authority to act will be asked, on the record and before the vote, what they intend to do.
Sources
- Autorité des marchés publics — Surveillance of practices and performance of the Quebec government's public digital projects (news release) [Live link]
- Gouvernement du Québec — Digital transformation projects: governance and oversight changes are needed [Live link]
- Le Devoir — Commission Gallant report: five numbers [Live link]
- La Presse — Gallant report on the SAAQclic fiasco: the SAAQ misled, Quebec was informed of cost overruns [Live link]