Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you all for attending and informing us today.
Professor Clarke, you touched on the necessary balance between the public and private sector in developing effective digital government, whether only at the federal level or subsequent levels of government in Canada. We have two examples. One is the failed—or failing—Phoenix pay system, where the procuring agency cut some of the complexities that the digital developer recommended to have an effective system in catching up with contracts, distributing pay and so forth. Then the button was pushed too early on that incomplete system, and we have the disaster we see today.
On the other hand, we have Toronto's Sidewalk Labs, where the city has pretty much given over all control to the Google sibling Sidewalk Labs and allowed it to develop...in great secrecy—more secrecy than many Torontonians and digital authorities would like, to the point that Jim Balsillie, formerly of BlackBerry, said, “[it] is not a smart city. It is a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism”.
How do we find that balance? Does government have to better educate itself to be an informed buyer and an informed overseer of the way a digital government service would be developed and operated?