SAAQclic fiasco: Karl Malenfant rejects blame, alleges character assassination ahead of Gallant report

Karl Malenfant claims that he has nothing to reproach himself for in the SAAQclic case and even that the project he spearheaded is not a fiasco.

On Wednesday, a few days before the Gallant Commission’s report was released, the former vice president of information technology at the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) decided to go on the offensive after receiving a notice of censure containing 48 allegations against him.

“I’m not here to blame everybody,” Karl Malenfant, one of SAAQclic’s key architects.

 “It’s not my job, but it’s… I’m here just to show you the link between each decision that we made during these six or seven years”

His lawyer Jean-François Bertrand, justifying Malenfant’s move and said, “During your testimony, he was unable to present his version of events in an orderly and structured manner, which would have allowed him to respond to all the accusations made against him.”

Appearing before the media in Montreal with a cart carrying boxes of documents that he handed out to reporters, including a 112-page response to the allegations against him, Malenfant stopped short of saying who was responsible, but claimed that he has been scapegoated.

Character assassination

Malenfant reported a concerted effort that resembled a conspiracy to harm him, an effort he said he learned about through a whistleblower. “He basically revealed to us that an IT firm, supported by a lobbying firm, (…) had orchestrated a character assassination strategy against me. The goal was to make the target, me, appear untrustworthy so that no one would listen to my defense. In short, it was an attempt to destroy someone’s public image in order to neutralize them.”

He did not want to identify the two firms in question or the person who acted as the whistleblower, and The Canadian Press was unable to verify the email exchanges in question, which were not included in the mass of documents he handed over to the press.

Malenfant insisted that he had never been solely responsible for the project, as responsibility was shared between the project owner, i.e., the board of directors, which decided on the direction and strategies and signed the checks, the developer, in this case the alliance formed by the IT firms IBM/LGS and SAP, and the project manager, in this case himself and his team.

“I was not alone accountable because I had around me 44 managers to help me to manage all this project,” Malenfant said. “I was not the one who had the money. It was the board of direction of the SAAQ.”

He recounted, for example, that he had agreed to postpone the launch of SAAQclic until January 2023 when several stakeholders said they were not ready, but that the disastrous launch the following month had been given the green light by everyone.

“How come it’s always my fault?”

“In February, they all told us to go ahead, specifically the leading experts at IBM said to go ahead. Marsolais (Denis Marsolais, former CEO of the SAAQ) heard this and said to go ahead. The six VPs (vice presidents) and their teams, who, as with the delivery, were preparing for the rollout and were ready. Our external auditor, who was present at the meetings every day—because we had meetings every day for a month—was there. It was a collective decision. How come it’s always my fault?”

He also wondered how he could be blamed for imposing the choice of SAP software when that decision had been made three years before he was hired.

He also criticized the prosecutors on the Gallant Commission for presenting only “coasters” showing green lights, which suggested that the board of directors was kept in the dark about cost overruns and delays. However, he said that his complete report, which the commission ignored, was not based on tablecloths, but on multiple documents that he showed to journalists, in which the deterioration of indicators, which turned yellow and red over the months, showed that the board of directors had been well aware of the situation for a long time.

Slide from a presentation by former vice-president of IT at SAAQ, denying the cost overruns of SAAQclic ahead of the Gallant Commission report, on Feb. 11, 2026 (Submitted by: Karl Malenfant)

Not a fiasco

The Auditor General estimates the troubled rollout could cost taxpayers at least $1.1 billion by 2027 roughly half a billion more than planned.

But Malenfant, said it was wrong to say the computer project would have cost more than a billion dollars and rejected the idea it’s a failure or a fiasco insisting the system is working. 

“When I hear that we put one billion dollars in the river, it’s false. It’s working,” he said.

According to him, the cost overruns cited by the Auditor General are erroneous since they are based on a calculation that includes both construction and operating costs, which he says is like “mixing apples and bananas,” an expression used by one of the expert witnesses before the commission. Admittedly, there were cost overruns, but the way he had prepared the contract forced IBM/LGS to absorb $100 million of them, he argued. At the same time, he boasted that the SAAQclic project was one of those with the lowest cost overruns among a series of public sector computerization projects.

Slide from a presentation by Karl Malenfant, former vice-president of IT at SAAQ, ahead of the Gallant Commission report, on Feb. 11, 2026 (Submitted by: Karl Malenfant)

Daniel Tran, director of communications and governmental affairs at Casacom, said: “Normally in this type of process you’re supposed to have safeguards so when things go over budget you need explanations.”

Malenfant said there were explanations, while rejecting the term “fiasco,” arguing that SAAQclic works and that it is a “sustainable investment paid at its fair value.” He asks that people stop using this expression out of respect for the 500 or so people on his team who worked on it.

“Fiasco means nothing works. It’s a definition. It’s working. We have difficulty. The go-live number two was difficult. It’s true. We have explanation.”

Bertrand noted that the six projects—including SAAQclic—presented by his client with their cost overruns all have one thing in common: they were carried out by IBM/LGS. “I find it curious that, to date, they have not had to answer any questions. After all, they were the ones who set the costs for the work they had to do,” said the lawyer.

“Why there is a public commission on Karl Malenfant. You see five other projects, by example, but there’s no tag name on the story,” Malenfant said.

Analysts say the report could also point fingers at others, including former transport minister Geneviève Guilbault and former cybersecurity minister Éric Caire.

“The media has talked a lot about Mr. Malenfant, I’m going to be curious in the next coming weeks is that who else is going to be have the fingers pointed at them,” Tran said.

Tran added that other projects facing issues should also be scrutinized.

“There’s never one project that’s better than the other all projects that goes over and are not well managed should be put out there publicly so that people dig into it so that this type of situation never happens again,” Tran said.

Bertrand did not want to rule out possible legal action, but said he preferred to wait for the report to be filed before seeing what his client would do.