The province’s move to a digital vehicle-registration system saw a calamitous launch February 2023—two years on, online services still don’t work
What happens when a provincially-owned corporation is allowed to spend billions of public dollars with virtually no oversight—all while going out of its way to conceal a litany of errors, cost overruns, and seemingly illegal practices to avoid having to reveal its financial reality? You get the latest scandal involving the Quebec auto-insurance bureau (the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec, or SAAQ), an entity that has spent the last several years trying, and failing, to launch an online portal to serve citizens.
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Perhaps “fail” is too mild of a word, here. The move to push the vast majority of the SAAQ’s services into the cloud—called SAAQclic—has so far cost an astounding $1.1 billion dollars, which is almost double the original estimate for the project. That enormous figure was only revealed in February, when the province’s auditor general released a damning report detailing cost overruns and a culture of incompetence within the organization.
Yesterday’s Technology, Today
The seeds of SAAQclic’s downfall were planted all the way back in 2017, when the province began to make long-needed upgrades to license bureau information systems that were so outdated, Quebec drivers couldn’t even order personalized plates. Much of the technology relied on by the SAAQ dated back an astonishing four decades.
SAAQclic was definitely an idea whose time had come. The goal for the SAAQ was to move many of the services that required in-person visits to the license board’s offices (such as renewal of a driver’s permit, transfer or registration of a vehicle, payment of certain fines and services) onto the web. The portal would also provide a storehouse for all information relating to their SAAQ account, allowing them to see demerit points accumulated, the cars and trucks currently in their possession, as well as manage any medical or health restrictions associated with their license. Overall, 300 separate systems used by the bureau were to be replaced by SAAQclic.
Complete And Utter Failure At Every Level
It was an ambitious plan, and one that after nearly five years of development was claimed to be ready for prime-time. At least, that was the public-facing attitude of the SAAQ. Within, the tech partners that the bureau had been working with had repeatedly warned that major portions of the system were untested, and those that had gone through validation weren’t meeting expected performance standards. The SAAQ’s own union also voiced concerns about the system.
It’s here that the public became aware of the SAAQclic drama, in spectacular fashion. Launched in February of 2023, the concerns that had been swept under the rug by the organization were suddenly front and center when the entire system began to fail almost immediately.
Even if an account could be created, it became virtually unworkable to log in to the system, which crashed on a continual basis. Those lucky few who could jump through all of the hoops and somehow access their account encountered blank screens instead of important documents like vehicle registrations.
Compounding the issue was the fact the SAAQ had paused processing a huge number of transactions in the period leading up to the digital transition. This meant there were 430,000 transactions waiting to be made official on the day the system went online, something it was completely incapable of dealing with.
The official response to all of the above only underscored how unprepared the SAAQ was for SAAQclic. The province was forced to hire roughly 150 additional employees that it dispersed to various in-person outlets like an expeditionary force to deal with the hordes of angry citizens showing up in droves. Even then, workers were instructed to demonstrate how people could use the SAAQclic service, a problematic choice given its instability even within the government’s IT infrastructure.
The end result was that Quebecois avoided SAAQclic almost entirely, dropping traffic on the website below past levels for its much smaller list of pre-clic online services. Physical locations continued to be swamped, surging past the number of visitors in years previous and having the exact opposite of the portal’s planned effect on efficiency.
How Did This Happen?
The ensuing report was published in February of this year, and it revealed far more about the situation at the SAAQ than seemingly even the provincial government was aware of. It’s here the additional $500 million dollars of expenditures were detailed, along with the scathing judgment that SAAQclic still did not come close to meeting the needs of citizens.
Some $638 million in spending was projected to take place over the next 10 years—it took just a little over half that time for the SAAQ to spend almost double that amount
Will Anything Change?
Realistically, this does little to instill confidence that these kinds of cost overruns are being taken seriously. It beggars belief that Quebec’s Transport minister can keep their job despite their ignorance of what was happening under their watch at the automobile insurance bureau, regardless of how the SAAQ may have practised to deceive. Surely, it is the responsibility of government ministers to ensure full accountability of the bureaucracies that support them.
The best outcome for Quebec citizens would be for an inquiry to lay bare the culture of secrecy at the SAAQ, reveal how it has been able to spend billions of taxpayer dollars with seemingly no oversight at all, and hold responsible those ministers who turned a blind eye to this part of their portfolio. It’s clear that “business as usual” is no longer a viable policy for the SAAQ, a bureaucracy that has shown itself to be operating above the law for far too long.