The contracts awarded to Amazon by Quebec and Ottawa have exploded in the past year to reach nearly $ 38 million, more than double what had been awarded in 10 years.
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The majority of contracts concern the storage of government data in cloud computing servers (cloud).
Last year alone, the federal government signed contracts worth $24.6 million with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the IT arm of billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company.
Between 2011 and 2020, Ottawa paid $15.7 million in IT contracts and purchases on Amazon’s online platform.
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) alone spent over $12M last year on AWS services.
One of the contracts signed by the multinational with the CBSA alone went from $400,000 to more than $10 million.
Courtesy picture
In 2020, our journalist Dominique Cambron-Goulet worked incognito at Amazon’s distribution center in Montreal to report on working conditions.
The biggest contract
On the Quebec side, Amazon won, at the very end of 2020, the largest cloud computing contract ever awarded by the government. The details of this over-the-counter agreement of just over $10 million were not made public until last June.
The three-year pact with the Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital should be used to consolidate all of the provincial government’s computer systems.
In total, AWS has secured more than $13M in contracts since the end of 2020.
The departments of Executive Council, Municipal Affairs, Environment and the Treasury Board Secretariat have also chosen Jeff Bezos’ company for their IT services.
As revealed by our Parliamentary Office in February, this ministry led by Éric Caire took over the management of cloud computing agreements for the various government agencies, because almost everyone lined up to choose Amazon.
“There is a risk of strong technological dependence on this supplier and a reduction in government governance”, indicated a government presentation to which we had access.
- Listen to Félix Séguin’s column at the microphone of Richard Martineau on QUB radio:
Distribution
The American giant has established itself in Quebec in recent years with distribution centers in the borough of Lachine, in Montreal, and Coteau-du-Lac, in addition to a data center in Varennes, also in Montérégie.
With these investments, Amazon qualified for a 15-year tax holiday. However, it is unclear whether the company pays taxes to the government. Even the Minister of the Economy of Quebec, Pierre Fitzgibbon, admitted not knowing it in an interview with our Bureau of investigation last year.
Big, big numbers
▶ Federal contracts and purchases from 2011 to 2020
15,7 M$
▶ Federal contracts last year
24,6 M$
▶ Quebec contracts and purchases (2019 to December 2020)
1,6 M$
▶ Since December 2020
13,3 M$
You will be able to find out the details of our discoveries on the web giant in our report L’envers d’Amazon which will be broadcast this evening at 9 p.m., on TVA, as part of the program J.E.
