Federal officials called on to explain purchase of $9M luxury condo

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OTTAWA – MPs are summoning top government officials and Canada’s consul general in New York to explain the decision by Global Affairs Canada to buy a $9-million luxury condo on Manhattan’s “Billionaires’ Row.”

MPs of all political stripes on the Commons government operations committee Wednesday agreed to summon Consul General Tom Clark, as well as top diplomatic, procurement and Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) officials to justify the purchase of the luxury condo as the new official residence for Canada’s Consul General in the city.

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Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly will also be required to testify if the committee deems it necessary during three meetings in late August.

The new condo is in Steinway Tower, the world’s thinnest skyscraper, located just south of Central Park on a stretch known colloquially as “Billionaire’s Row” for its pricey luxury real estate.

A listing for the new unit shows it has three bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms, as well as a wet bar, a powder room finished in jewel onyx and plenty of space for entertaining.

Global Affairs has said that the new purchase was required because the consul general’s existing residence, located at 550 Park Ave., hasn’t been refurbished since 1982 and bringing it back to department standards would cost too much.

It has so far refused to share the estimated cost of those renovations and has claimed that the purchase presents the “opportunity” for taxpayers to save $2 million, when accounting for the sale of the old residence.

The Commons committee also gave Global Affairs 21 days to provide a full list of all other properties it considered purchasing or made an offer on before settling on the unit in Steinway Tower.

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Conservative MP Kelly Block, who brought forward the motion to study the purchase, told the committee the expense was “extremely disturbing, but perhaps not surprising.”

“We have seen the complete lack of spending controls on major procurement,” she said.

Bloc Québécois MP Julie Vignola said that $9 million is equivalent to the lifetime earnings of nine average taxpayers.

During the same committee meeting, two IT procurement specialists detailed to MPs how many of the government’s current practices are so faulty that they’re akin to a “shocking betrayal of responsible stewardship of public funds.”

Former federal public servant and researcher Sean Boots and Carleton associate professor Amanda Clarke were asked to detail the issues and offer solutions to the federal government’s ongoing IT procurement problems that have led to scandals like the Phoenix pay system and ArriveCan.

Earlier this month, the National Post reported on a study they published saying that Ottawa’s IT procurement rules are so bad they violate nearly every globally accepted best practice and will likely lead to more scandals.

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Some key issues are overly long and costly contracts, a lack of variety in suppliers, the failure to prioritize open-source software options, the granting to companies intellectual property (IP) over products they develop for the government and a “dearth of in-house competency.”

On Wednesday, Boots said that up to 90 per cent of bureaucrats working on large federal government IT projects are focused on paperwork instead of building software, one of many procurement problems that lead to “mediocre and unreliable” products.

“A large project that has 100 public servants working on it, 90 of them will be writing Word documents that are, you know, project management, oversight compliance reports and all sorts of things that are not actually building the software,” he said.

“If you’ve 100 people and only maybe five of them are actually writing software code configuring systems, that’s a really odd ratio.”

Clarke and Boots said that government procurement is plagued by red tape and paperwork that bogs down the system, prevents innovation and favours big consulting companies who know how to navigate the rules.

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Every time a procurement issue comes up like ArriveCan or Phoenix, the government’s solution is “follow the rules harder,” they said.

“Ultimately, what the IT procurement system does best is shuffle taxpayer money towards large established vendors and IT consulting firms,” Boots noted.

Clarke told MPs that “aggressive action” to change procurement rules is needed if the government won’t commit to a “control-alt-delete” on current rules.

“We need to force good behaviour really hard … What we see is sort of soft and largely unread Treasury Board guidelines,” she said.

“We say the right things in Canada, but then we don’t actually force public servants to do those things, and that’s kind of the problem.”

National Post

With files from The Canadian Press

cnardi@postmedia.com

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