Government Operations Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2013

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Ms. Doucet, you are telling me that you have backups. You have always had backups for all your operations. These may be daily, weekly, monthly, or annual. It is nothing out of the ordinary. This is normal standard practice in any professional sector.

I am convinced that Shared Services Canada provides you with a professional service. My question is very clear: did you store backups of these emails somewhere? Yes or no?

[Michelle Doucet]

We have backup copies for 30 days, and at the end of 30 days, the backup copies are not there.

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Is it the policy of the Prime Minister's Office to destroy everything after 30 days?

[Michelle Doucet]

The 30-day period to which I spoke is not related to the rules on records management. The 30-day period to which I spoke is related to the backup capacity requirement for the Government of Canada to assist in disaster recovery, or business continuity.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Blanchette.

Mr. Komarnicki, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you very much.

I'll pursue some of the comments made by Mr. O'Connor a little further. I look at your actual spending in dollars and I note that in 2010-11 you were about at $159.9 million down to $121.9, a savings of $37 million.

I take it you don't have much room to be able to make sure those reductions happen except by new ways of doing business, perhaps technology and people are the areas you might deal with. I commend you for going in the right direction and reducing the cost of operation.

One of the ways you mentioned is boosting productivity and using modern alternatives to travel. I know in our committees witnesses can travel to the committee or can do video conferencing instead and save some dollars; rather than sending people, you connect them electronically. It's a culture that takes some time to change to get to that place.

Are you experiencing some of that and is some of what I'm mentioning the kind of thing you might be doing or are there other things you're doing to reduce costs?

[Michelle Doucet]

Mr. Chair, I'm going to start with a short overview and then I'm going to ask Ms. Cahill to talk a bit about our expenditures.

At the Privy Council Office, because we have no programs, we tend to travel a bit less than some of the other departments in town. We have some folks who obviously travel. Mr. Elcock—you were speaking with him before—travels extensively, usually on very short notice on gruelling flights and times and distances to not particularly hospitable locations, but the rest of us have a tendency to stay a bit closer to home.

I'm going to ask Karen to take you through our spending on travel. Wherever possible, we use video conferencing and teleconferencing. We're starting to take advantage of technologies like GCconnex, where we can talk internally through the government.

One of the things we do at the Privy Council Office is, of course, coordination and so we make sure that we try to piggyback onto other coordinating meetings. If we know we have a group of American officials in town to meet with Mr. Moloney on the Regulatory Cooperation Council or the Beyond the Border initiative, and the national security advisor wants to talk to his American counterparts, those might be the same folks, and that saves him a trip to Washington when he can just go down the street to 66 Slater and see Mr. Moloney.

We take advantage of technology, but we also work smart. We use our common sense to try to reduce how much we've spent on travel in the past year or so.

Karen, would you like to add to that?

[Karen Cahill, Executive Director, Finance and Corporate Planning Division, Privy Council Office]

Thank you very much.

Our travel expenses have decreased quite a lot over the years. In 2012-13, our year-end expenditures for travel were $2.3 million over a budget of $3.5 million. This year, we expect these travel expenditures to be approximately the same, or even less than $2.3 million.

As Ms. Doucet explained, PCO has focused a great deal on cost-saving measures, applying the new directive on travel, hospitality, and conferences very seriously and finding alternate measures rather than travel.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I have one other question, if I might. Despite the fact you're reducing costs in one area, I notice you are asking for additional funding to combat human smuggling. I understand that follows from a policy decision that's being carried out by another department or departments and there's probably funding there as well.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one or more of those departments do the coordination rather than having a separate department oversee the coordination of the program that is in large part emanating from another department or through another program?

[Michelle Doucet]

Justifying the need for a coordinating role is always interesting and I think what it does is it.... My first response to you would be that when we're engaged in work about which we are passionate, work that matters....

So if you're in the department of immigration and citizenship and you're involved in combatting human smuggling, you're going to be passionate about that because that really matters. If you're in another department that's working on that, for instance the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, you're interested in the same broad objective, but you have your own way of getting to that and you're caught up in what you're doing. As folks work in line departments across governments, sometimes it can be hard to see the horizontal forest because you're sort of caught up in the trees. Thus the need for coordination.

Mr. Alcock has a fairly small team at the Privy Council Office in terms of his coordinating role. He's gone a lot of the time travelling, talking to key folks in international partner countries. In fact he has his folks out in the field a lot. The substance of the day-to-day work gets done in the line departments—

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

I am going to have to interrupt you, Ms. Doucet.

[Michelle Doucet]

—but somebody has to pull all of the pieces of the picture together for the national security advisor.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

You are well over your time.

We will now move on to Mr. Byrne for five minutes.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for appearing before us.

Madame Doucet, you are in a very important position and you are appearing before us at a very important time because you have a unique capacity to be able to describe to this committee the information technology architecture that's inherent within the Privy Council Office.

You have intrigued the committee already with your statements that, from a disaster mitigation point of view, there is a mechanism to be able to hold electronic records, but only for.... By an architectural design, if I can summarize what you said, it will only keep those records for 30 days. There are obviously other architectural elements to the information technology systems of the Privy Council Office for the retention of electronic records. Could you describe to the committee what those systems are?

An individual writing an e-mail will obviously hold that e-mail on their own personal computer for an indefinite period of time, but there are also obviously other servers in the Privy Council Office that hold electronic records, e-mail records in particular. Would you be able to describe the architecture, being the assistant deputy minister of corporate services for the Privy Council Office?

[Michelle Doucet]

As much as I'd like to be able to give you the technical explanation that I understand you are looking for, I'm not qualified to do that. I have folks who do that for me.

However, appearing before you after me are the folks from Shared Services Canada who are much more knowledgeable on the architecture of our IT systems.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Would one individual in the Privy Council Office fall under your mandate? That individual is the access to information and privacy officer. Would that fall within corporate services?

[Michelle Doucet]

Yes, it does.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

It does.

Was the Privy Council's access to information and privacy coordinator engaged during the course of the study or investigation or the look into those e-mails in question, from the Prime Minister's former legal counsel?

[Michelle Doucet]

On the subject of the e-mails to which you refer, I will begin by saying something I said before, which is that it's the mandate of the Privy Council Office to provide professional non-partisan advice and support to the government.

It's not our job to provide advice on personal or political matters to our ministers' offices and it would be highly unusual for PCO to have records on personal or political matters. So to answer your question, yes, whenever we receive an ATIP request, I have an ATIP division that coordinates the work around that and makes sure that the delegation instrument that is in place is implemented in the response to each and every request and that we follow the rules that the legislation, interpreted by court decisions, has set out for us.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Shouldn't that decision be the matter of interpretation not by the departments themselves but governed by the access to information coordinators and subject to judicial review should there be a disagreement as to whether something falls within the mandate of the Access to Information Act or not? Something being severed, once you delete electronic records it's the ultimate capital punishment of that particular record. It cannot be recovered. Therefore there can be no adjudication.

Is it normal policy or is it anywhere written that it is acceptable, whether it contains political records or not, that these records are eligible to be destroyed?

[Michelle Doucet]

What you are speaking of is in essence the records management policy and, in addition to the legislation that governs what records need to be kept by public servants, is interpreted by Treasury Board guidelines on record-keeping. Information management is related to but does not fall under the rubric of the access to information coordinator. The access to information coordinator comes in after documents have been created and preserved once an access request is made. Then it is his or her responsibility to apply the legislation and—

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

So you're saying you can bypass this by destroying the records? If the records are not produced and put forward to the access to information coordinator then there's nothing for the access to information coordinator to decide upon. A very convenient method of circumventing this is to simply destroy the records so that they're not presented to the access to information coordinator.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Byrne.

I will give Ms. Doucet a few seconds to answer your question.

[Michelle Doucet]

As I said before, there are rules regarding what records can be kept and what records can be deleted. All public servants are expected to follow those rules.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Ms. Doucet.

Mr. Van Kesteren, you also have five minutes.