MONTREAL — Given time, governments tend to become what they profess to hate. Jean Chrétien despised free trade when he became prime minister in 1993, and loved it when he left in 2003. Stephen Harper rode into power promising to air out Liberal stink in Ottawa, only to leave office just over a decade later on a similar waft. 

Quebec Premier François Legault’s transition has been comparatively speedy. His Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government came to power in 2018 promising to rid Quebec of the previous Liberal government’s predilection for favouritism and patronage. This conceit went more or less untouched until February 2025, when the province’s auditor-general released a report detailing the province’s very expensive, very ineffective and possibly dangerous attempt to digitize the agency charged with licensing automobiles and drivers.

To wit: the 10-year effort to drag the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) into the 21st century will cost $1.1 billion by 2027—with one part of the project going 329 per cent over budget. This effort, known as SAAQclic, was an instant failure upon its rollout in early 2023, resulting in long lines and overloaded servers. It was a reminder—and there are plenty—that governments aren’t very good at big tech projects.

It wasn’t just long lines and hassles, however. According to Quebec auditor general Guylaine Leclerc, the SAAQ migrated SAAQclic online without assuring the “reliability and integrity” of the system or the data. As a result, a lot of people were able to manipulate this data unchecked, putting at risk the personal details of some 5.5 million drivers in the province.

The auditor’s report found that the SAAQ brain trust was well aware of SAAQclic’s shortcomings, yet said everything was kosher even as it was awash in blown deadlines and quality control issues. Seemingly part of this business-as-usual ploy was an SAAQ-commissioned report from PwC in August 2023 that extolled SAAQclic’s impressive “delivery methodology” and “gradual improvement.” Gradual indeed: the SAAQ says it won’t have SAAQclic’s system errors reduced to an acceptable level until December 2025, nearly two years after SAAQclic went live. 

The name Éric Caire doesn’t appear in the auditor general’s report, but it looms large over the SAAQclic debacle. First elected in 2007, Caire was named cybersecurity and digital technology minister in 2022. A programmer by trade, Caire taught college-level computer science for a year in the early aughts. This was apparently enough for Legault to put him in charge of the  government’s $5.8-billion digital government initiative. It probably helped, too, that Caire has long been a Legault favourite.

Caire recently said he knew nothing of the SAAQclic issues, which is bad enough. Yet according to documents unearthed by Le Devoir, Caire knew how badly things were going as far back as June 2022. If this is indeed true it means Caire knew of the delays and associated cost overruns; oversaw the greenlighting of SAAQclic regardless; then said he knew nothing about any of it after the fact. 

It’s a dubious political trifecta, to which you can add a fourth: Legault defended Caire to the nines—at first, anyway. Caire “wasn’t given the right information,” Quebec’s premier said late last month. A day later Legault accepted Caire’s resignation. Having once denounced political patronage in all its forms, Legault travelled down its well-trodden path: defend favourites until they inflict the maximum amount of political damage, then let them resign.

There are many competent people in the CAQ cabinet. In feigning ignorance as to the SAAQclic mess, Caire proved he was not among them. Much like Elon Musk to the south, he gained prominence in government by ingratiating himself to the boss. Like Musk, Caire has inadvertently underscored how the digital transformation of governments is a big, important, expensive job requiring true expertise, not slavish political devotion.

In ordinary circumstances, this might be fin de régime stuff for Legault’s government. These aren’t ordinary circumstances, though. Like the rest of the planet, Quebec is dealing with U.S President Donald Trump. That said, Legault has called a public inquiry into SAAQclic, the results of which will land before the next provincial election in October 2026. At the very least, SAAQclic will likely remind voters how the Legault government is now very much what it used to decry. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”