SAAQclic management lied to the Quebec government for years, commission concludes
The management of the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec blatantly lied over a long period of time to the provincial government about the real costs and progress of the auto insurance board’s digital platform SAAQclic, which was supposed to simplify interactions between the public and the auto insurance board but instead resulted in long lines of Quebecers standing in the cold waiting for service at SAAQ outlets after the website crashed when it was launched in February 2023.
That’s the conclusion of the Gallant Commission, which tabled its report Monday after a 16-month investigation into the SAAQclic fiasco that cost taxpayers $1.1 billion, nearly double the original estimate.
The report is careful about not blaming anyone in particular for the bungled operation. Premier François Legault emerges unscathed. But commissioner Denis Gallant has also concluded that the government was made aware of the cost overruns as early as 2023, which is much sooner than ministers have acknowledged.
Information about the cost overrun did filter up to the highest offices of Quebec government, Gallant concluded, but Premier François Legault emerges unscathed.
Legault was quick to respond.
“I want to be very clear,” Legault told reporters in Montreal shortly after the Gallant report became public on Monday. “The report from the Gallant Commission clearly shows that for years the administration of the SAAQ lied to our government.
“Never, before February 2025, did the directors of the SAAQ tell us the (original project) cost of $660 million was revised to $1.1 billion. The highest number we received was $682 million.”
As he had in the past, Legault said it’s true his government was not perfect in what is now referred to as the SAAQclic fiasco.
“We should have been more wary,” he said. “We could have asked more questions.”
Legault added Quebec’s anti-corruption unit, UPAC, is looking into the file and he has asked his team to examine possible legal recourse against the directors of the SAAQ.
Gallant’s 826-page report is blunt in its assessment of the SAAQclic project, which was supposed to simplify interactions between the public and the auto insurance board but instead resulted in long lines of Quebecers standing in the cold waiting for service at SAAQ outlets after the website crashed when it was launched in February 2023.
The report says the SAAQclic project was too centralized in the hands of a few experts and in reality was just “too big, too much, too fast,” and relied on untested technology.
But that’s not what the SAAQ was telling the government about a project known internally as CASA, short for Carrefour des services d’affaires.
“After weighing all the evidence, the commission finds that for much of the CASA program’s duration, the SAAQ lied to all parliamentarians, ministers and their staff about the program’s implementation status,” the report concludes.
“The state-owned enterprise submitted multiple misleading reports to state authorities to conceal the program’s cost overruns,” Gallant writes.
“The commission deplores the SAAQ’s behaviour toward the democratic mechanisms specifically designed to enable MNAs to monitor and audit government accounts.”
The report is careful about not blaming anyone in particular for the fiasco, noting government officials were “largely kept in the dark” about the difficulties the SAAQ was having.
But former transport minister Geneviève Guilbault’s version of what happened is questioned. Despite Guilbault’s testimony at the commission that she learned of the overruns from the auditor general, Gallant concludes then-SAAQ CEO Éric Ducharme informed her in June 2023 that the project’s budget projection was off.
The commission’s lawyers produced documents detailing a meeting between Guilbault and Ducharme that made a clear reference to the cost overruns.
“I am not saying this did not happen,” Guilbault responded at her appearance before the commission in August 2025. “I am telling you I don’t remember.”
Gallant qualifies Guilbault’s memory as “rather vague.”
Later Monday, Guilbault responded on social media.
“I am not perfect and the members of my team should maybe have been more vigilant and better informed me of their exchanges with the SAAQ,” she wrote.
Guilbault’s predecessor as transport minister, François Bonnardel, gets off easier. Gallant concludes Bonnardel learned about the budget in the winter of 2021, but even then the SAAQ did not tell him it had increased by more than $300 million since its inception.
The commission concludes that beginning in 2021, the government was told the SAAQclic budget would be $682 million, but reassuring statements were made by senior SAAQ management.
While the initial estimate was that the project would cost taxpayers $638 million over 10 years, the ultimate cost to taxpayers is expected to be $1.1 billion.
Gallant is also not tender with former SAAQ digital experience vice-president Karl Malenfant, who was responsible for creating the platform. Gallant says that from the get-go, Malenfant had too much power and chose to surround himself with people he had worked with for years.
At one point in the report, Gallant accuses Malenfant of submitting documents to the government that were “brazenly misleading.”
Gallant says many of the key positions were controlled by a single person, Malenfant, “which is incompatible with a healthy control environment.”
Malenfant called a news conference last week to assert he was the victim of a smear campaign.
Some days it was completely paralyzed, leaving clients unable to access their accounts to pay registration fees or make appointments for driving tests.
Commission investigator Michel Comeau outlined some of the issues: the inability of the SAAQ to produce licence plates or open or update client files, erroneous information going to the courts and municipalities, and vehicles listed as stolen when they were not.
The problems trickled down to car dealers and the police. In one incident, the family of a young boy with cancer was surrounded by police with guns drawn on the way out of a hospital because the police file from the SAAQ listed their car as stolen.
There were also long lineups in the dead of winter as desperate clients sought services in person at SAAQ outlets.
Gallant points out the obvious in his report.
“From its inception, the CASA program’s design and management were plagued by an extremely high risk of failure,” he says.
Quebec’s three opposition parties immediately pounced on the report, accusing the government of covering up the truth.
“The Legault government lied to us,” said Liberal transport critic Monsef Derraji.
“It’s theft — theft of public money, and negligence too,” added Québec solidaire justice critic Haroun Bouazzi.
The Gallant Commission, which cost about $7 million, sat for 75 days and heard from 130 witnesses. The commission’s team of 60 people pored over more than 200,000 pages of documents.
Investigators under the command of retired police officer Robert Pigeon met with 350 people.
The time allocated to the commission was extended twice. Initially, the report was due Sept. 30, but it was delayed to Dec. 15 and then Feb. 13. Gallant presented his findings to the government Friday and made them public Monday.
Throughout the process, the commission struggled to get to the bottom of what happened and who knew what inside the government.
In all, the commission heard from five cabinet ministers, including former transport ministers Guilbault and Bonnardel, plus former digital technology minister Éric Caire. Legault testified, as did his chief of staff Martin Koskinen.
Kalina Laframboise of The Gazette contributed to this report.
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