2024 review: explosion in the costs of IT projects in the Quebec government

Five government IT projects alone have caused cost overruns totaling more than $400 million, and all indications are that the hemorrhaging will continue into 2025.

More problems for SAAQclic

Driving licenses suspended without reason, money taken by mistake, computer systems failure: the problems caused by the catastrophic deployment of SAAQclic continued to accumulate this year.

The bill for this digital project, which is now around $612 million, is growing more and more as time goes by: last summer, the Automobile Insurance Company authorized expenses of $39 An additional $1 million for information technology services, team training and licensing fees.

This is without taking into account that the government had to pay $48.6 million to replace all the servers and “avoid service breakdowns,” such as the major outage that paralyzed SAAQclic one morning in May.

The transition to Santé Québec costs an arm and a leg

The year 2024 has also confirmed to us that leaving the fax era in the health network is not an easy operation.

Even before its implementation, the pilot project to digitize the health network saw its bill swell by $42 million, as reported The Journal in spring.

And we are not at the end of our troubles. The transition to Santé Québec is also proving to be very expensive, while the repatriation of administrative data from the various establishments in the network will cost $430 million, or $228 million more than initially planned.

In addition to cost overruns, all of these projects are experiencing significant delays.

Exploding costs for the government's new internet network

The implementation of the government's new telecommunications network was a real surprise box in 2024.

Basically, replacing the Quebec state internet network was only supposed to cost $8.2 million. But after multiple budget increases, notably due to delays by Bell in carrying out the work, the bill has now reached $46.9 million, an increase of 472%.

And this does not include the $190 million that is necessary to maintain the old network during the transition, and the $32.8 million that will be used to connect departments and agencies to the new network.

Millions swallowed up in the Blue Basket for nothing

God rest his soul, the Blue Basket has been resting in peace since the end of February. This is because the Quebec online sales platform was not generating enough revenue.

The adventure therefore lasted four short years. Launched by the Legault government in April 2020 as a non-profit organization, the Panier Bleu passed into private hands in June 2022, becoming the property of the Agora Inc platform.

This private company counted among its shareholders Desjardins, the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, the company Lightspeed and Investissement Québec. he “transactional” version of the site cost $22 million. As an NPO, the Panier Bleu had received $4.4 million in subsidies from Quebec.

Not easy, making a new website

Outdoor enthusiasts must equip themselves with a compass and a lot of patience to carry out research and transactions on the Sépaq website, and have done so for several years.

Fortunately, the state company is working on a new website, but it will ultimately be delivered with two years of delays and costs 45% higher than expected.

This IT project was supposed to be completed in the summer of 2023, but it will not be completed until… 2026! The bill will then reach $3.4 million, almost $1.1 million more than the initial budget.

Project costs generally undervalued, expert says

The Legault government should do its homework better to avoid repeating costly mistakes for taxpayers in the deployment of its digital transformation projects, argues an expert, while the cost of government IT projects is often “undervalued”.

“As long as we do not have an evaluation after the fact and we are not able to say in complete transparency the impacts we had with a project, we are not capable of improving either. », says Justin Lawarée, assistant professor at the National School of Public Administration, in an interview with The Journal.

“If we don’t generate knowledge with what went wrong, we risk making the same mistakes again. That, for the moment, we are not doing, so we are sailing by sight,” he adds.

Mismanagement

However, many government IT projects suffered from significant cost overruns in 2024, leading to unforeseen expenses of several hundred million dollars (see other text).

For Mr. Lawarée, these increases are due, at least in part, to problems of mismanagement.

“When a project goes from $50 million to $200 million, for example, there was either poor management or poor analysis of the infrastructure, or we did not realize the extent of the organizational dimension that it represented. IT projects are not just about software, you also have to take into account change management, employee training, etc.,” he explains.

Further increases in 2025?

Furthermore, Professor Lawarée expects that the government's digital transformation projects will still face cost increases in 2025.

“Logically, yes,” he said. “If there are plans, it will be inevitable.”

But Mr. Lawarée also believes that “many projects will go by the wayside,” since information technology budgets have been reduced in several ministries. “We are in a budgetary context that is rigorous, even austere,” he says.

In the meantime, the expert points out that the initial budget for IT projects tends to be underestimated. “It’s partly because we can’t predict everything in advance. It regularly happens that the scope of a project changes along the way, and this results in a revision of budgets and schedules,” he says.