SNOBELEN: How muffins torpedoed Canada's ability to buy stuff

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What do warships, payroll services, vaccines and muffins have in common?  They are all things our governments are incapable of buying.

Let’s start with muffins.  Back in 2009, I was horrified when the then-Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter reported that an eHealth consultant had expensed a tea and muffin. The amount expensed was … wait for it … $3.26.

Oddly, the muffin was not the main focus of the audit. McCarter was principally concerned with more than a billion dollars wasted on ill-fated efforts to produce electronic health records.

But failed attempts to bring human health records up to the standards enjoyed in veterinary practice didn’t get much public attention. The muffin did.

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I remember wondering at the time how much that muffin would end up costing taxpayers as the government, in the tireless battle to eradicate muffin expensing, loaded more process and boilerplate onto an already cumbersome procurement policy. You can bet the end cost runs into the millions.

The long, slow and expensive effort to produce electronic health records in Ontario isn’t an outlier.

Consider the business of paying people. Most businesses can reliably produce paycheques with a trip to Staples. But producing paycheques is a task too tough for the Government of Canada.

More than a decade after the Phoenix payroll system was announced, the promised savings of $70 million a year have not materialized. Instead, Canadians have wasted well over $2 billion as senior bureaucrats earn bonuses for “fixing” a fatally flawed system.

As a cowboy friend would say, payroll systems ain’t exactly rocket science.

Neither are boats.  Back in the Second World War days, when we didn’t have a modern procurement program, Canadians could build warships fast and cheaply. It’s a good thing our shores are not in urgent need of defending or the tragic comedy of the current protracted warship procurement process (first delivery 20-plus years after the contract was awarded) would be devastating.

You get the point. The long list of stuff government can’t buy includes fighter jets, submarines and pencil sharpeners. Basically, anything.

Why?  Well, as anyone who has ever invested in horses, guitars and whiskey can attest, value isn’t a simple equation.

Finding value requires the ability to understand purpose, function, utility and urgency.  Basically, the ability to set priorities.

Government priorities are all about optics and process. Value, utility and urgency don’t count for much.

Federal and provincial governments aren’t even the worst offenders. Some municipal governments routinely inflict inefficiencies on providers that protect public sector unions at the cost of taxpayers.

Governments are bad at buying stuff. Normally that fact is just frustrating and expensive.  During a pandemic, it’s deadly.

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Consider the early days of COVID-19. Canadians needed some basics to protect us from the virus – hand sanitizer, masks, face shields and the like.

Canadian companies rushed to fill the void but were often delayed or frustrated by government procurement policies that even politicians seemed unable to overcome. The same holds true for innovations in contract tracing and testing. The mighty muffin-protection barriers are impregnable.

All of which takes us to vaccines. While Canada has spent the most of any country on COVID-19 (way to go!) and is one of the leaders in the number of vaccines ordered (yeah!), it lags behind Estonia and Luxembourg in actual vaccines delivered (are we are still ahead of Bolivia?).

The vaccine procurement mess isn’t funny or partisan or simply embarrassing. It’s deadly.

That used to matter.