Madam Chair and honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are here today on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people.
On behalf of the team at Deloitte Canada, we are proud to discuss the project and work with members of Canada's public service. I will provide an overview of Deloitte's involvement in the CBSA revenue management project, also known as CARM, and its path to implementation, and an overview of the benefits CARM will bring to the people of Canada.
As the leading professional services firm in the country, fully owned by Canadians, we are proud of our past and ongoing projects with the Government of Canada, including our work with the CBSA, which have resulted from Canada’s open, transparent and competitive procurement processes. We are committed to the Government of Canada’s procurement and security policies. We perform our work in strict accordance with the highest professional standards. Our reputation is built on our credibility. With more than 167 years of experience as a Canadian firm, we have grown into the organization we are today because of the trust our clients have in our people and our values.
For my part, I have spent much of my career, more than 27 years, working with public sector clients on large digital transformation initiatives. My experience lies in leading large teams on highly complex projects.
CARM is designed to facilitate legitimate trade, improve compliance and revenue collection, and help secure Canada's borders.
On the strength of our specialized experience, Deloitte was retained through a competitive procurement process to act as systems integrator for the CARM project, implementing the policies and programs developed and decided upon by the Government of Canada. We are working closely with the CBSA to build this multi-year digital initiative to modernize and streamline the process of importing commercial goods, eliminate redundancies and streamline solutions.
CARM will be the first Government of Canada enterprise resource planning, or ERP, solution based on the SAP platform of scale hosted in a cloud environment. This represents a critical step in ensuring that the Government of Canada is prepared for the service delivery standards of tomorrow to serve Canadians.
We are taking a thoughtful and measured approach to implementation. CARM’s rollout has been structured as a series of go lives to help mitigate risk, working with stakeholders along the way at each step. The CARM client portal, for example, was launched in 2021 with publicly accessible onboarding documentation. We have gone through multiple rounds of testing of the system, executing more than 7,000 test case scenarios.
We have been working tirelessly to ensure a smooth transition through ongoing project management support, change enablement activities and ongoing environment management. This approach seeks to minimize the disruption to stakeholders within the Government of Canada and to businesses and importers.
This is a material change, and requires careful planning to help minimize impacts. I feel confident, based on my 30 years of experience and the work put into this program by all parties, that the solution is prepared to go live and to handle issues as they arise. The CARM project has been a journey of advancements. Release two is not the end of these advancements. This is not a “one and done” solution. Using the cloud, the CBSA will be able to continue to enhance and evolve CARM, allowing for a much more agile solution in a dynamic environment.
Once fully implemented, CARM will automate and simplify key business processes and offer online self-service tools to help the trade community do business in Canada better and faster.
The purpose of CARM is to eliminate duplicative data processing and promote greater transparency. It will provide better information so that CBSA can more accurately check commercial compliance.
At this point, I'd like to acknowledge the other panellists here today.
Your industry insights have been valuable, and they continue to be as we work through the various stages of CARM's rollout under the direction of the CBSA. CARM is the culmination of our collective efforts, and is a testament to the power of public and private collaboration in an era of rapid technology advancement.
Thank you again, Madam Chair. Deloitte is proud to be part of this work, and we look forward to continuing to work on behalf of Canadians.