Head of SAAQ loses his job; Eric Ducharme to take over

The head of Quebec's automobile insurance board, Denis Marsolais, has lost his job.

The Quebec government's cabinet confirmed the appointment of Éric Ducharme as CEO of the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ). His new role will take effect Thursday.

The departure of Marsolais comes amid the troubled roll-out of the SAAQ's new online portal, SAAQclic. Several SAAQ services were shut down for weeks prior to the release of its new portal, which launched with some hiccups and caused a backlog of 400,000 transactions. 

This led to long lineups outside service centres for weeks, mostly in Montreal, Gatineau and Saint-Jerome. 

In the fallout of the digital transformation in late February, Premier François Legault had said that he wanted to evaluate the work of the former CEO and the board of directors of the SAAQ because of what he described as "a serious lack of planning."

Even the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) minister responsible for cybersecurity and digital technology, Éric Caire, has admitted the roll-out was a "fiasco."

The mess was enough reason for Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault to call on the SAAQ to suspend a facial recognition project. "For the moment, I think we have our hands full with SAAQclic," she told reporters Tuesday.

Ducharme, the former CEO of Revenue Quebec, is the currently the Treasury Board Secretariat.

He holds a master's degree in economics from the Université Laval.

Treasury Board President Sonia LeBel congratulated Ducharme on his new appointment, calling him a "rigorous and dedicated man" in a Twitter post.

When it announced plans to roll out SAAQclic in late January, the agency said it was a major endeavour that involved converting "more than 10 billion pieces of data." The major revamp was intended to allow users to simplify certain transactions online, including licence renewal, payments for registration and exam reservations.

During a news conference Wednesday, Quebec's transport minister said such a project is a "huge challenge" for any organization, but added that it's the responsibility of the CEO to foresee any problems.

"This should have been [planned] a lot better," Guilbault said, adding that she's known Marsolais for the last decade and thanked him for his service.

She sidestepped questions about what responsibility the CAQ government shared for the hiccups and maintained that she could not wait for the digital transformation to be completed before replacing the CEO of the SAAQ.

"We have to make sure we have the right person to do that. And so you have Mr. Ducharme, who was at the Secrétaire du conseil du trésor, who once took care of all this digital transition in the whole government, so he knows the topic, he knows how to do it. This is good news," she said.

The government also announced a new interim CEO of Hydro-Quebec on Wednesday. Pierre Despars will take over from Sophie Brochu, who announced her resignation in mid-January.