Evidence of meeting #53 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was aws.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
What kind of design are you referring to?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
I'm referring to app design.
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
No, we don't do that.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
The totality of the services that you were able to provide you did provide on this project.
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm sorry.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Your company competed in a bidding process for the work that you received. Is that correct?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
We competed to be part of the framework agreement. As part of the framework agreement, line departments can procure up to a certain threshold in terms of service, but there's a ceiling to that threshold. Then, once you exceed or expect to exceed that threshold, there's a secondary phase of procurement that would become more competitive to ensure that the government was using the most transparent means to procure those services.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Mr. Barrett.
We're now going to go to Ms. Hepfner, who is online.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
We're going to go to Ms. Khalid.
Ms. Khalid, you have five minutes.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thanks, Chair.
Just picking up on what Mr. Barrett was speaking about, Ms. Foster, can you outline for us—in very layman's terms, because a lot of people may not understand—what Amazon Web Services did, specifically, in the ArriveCAN app? Within that framework, what was your role?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Again, it's really supporting the underlying infrastructure that supports the app.
If we think about other apps that we may be more familiar with, like Uber, you put in your address, and like magic, a car appears at your door and takes you to your destination. You don't even have to speak to the driver. All of that simplicity is supported by a whole lot of other back-end technology that makes that happen, from GPS to fastest route, to how you're paying for the service. You can split your bill. All that underlying infrastructure that supports the simplicity of the user interface has to be built.
In the case of ArriveCAN, it was using a lot of other aspects of infrastructure that are less obvious in terms of what you're seeing in the app. For example, if you upload your vaccination certificate, the app has to be able to read and verify that certificate. It has to be able to do it in multiple languages. You might remember that Ontario, for example, changed its vaccination documentation halfway through all of this. It has to be able to read the document and verify that it's a real document.
Another piece of infrastructure that has to be supported by the app was some of the accessibility features, like the ability to go from text to talk. That is another machine learning application that was enabled in the app.
It also had to be able to speak to other aspects of CBSA's infrastructure or PHAC's infrastructure in terms of data that it was verifying in real time once you uploaded your information in the app, as well as boarding information and your travel information. There were a number of pieces that needed to speak to each other in the simplicity of being able to interface with the app.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thanks for that.
Is it a government contract with respect to the ArriveCAN app? Is there public disclosure? Is it listed on your website? How do you let the public know how much the Government of Canada has paid you to do all this?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
In the case of all our customers, we protect customer confidentiality, so we would never proactively disclose that information without customer consent. It would really be up to our customers to choose to share that information.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Is any of this information, to your knowledge, shared publicly on any website, whether it's a government website or your own?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Do you mean in terms of the dollar amounts?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
My understanding, based on my preparations to be here today, is that I'm not sure if it's available online but I know there was documentation made available to this committee that we were able to view and verify.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Are you satisfied with the privacy framework—the privacy policy AWS has in place—not just for the ArriveCAN app but for all of its programming, all of its apps in general?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Really, the decisions around the governance of privacy and how data should be managed are really decisions that the customer has to make. Our role is to enable those decisions. Our job is to help our customers operationalize privacy and meet their own standards or the standards they have to operate within. Our job, really, is to provide the tools to enable the customer to govern data in the way they want to govern their data.
We're very aware of our own security parameters in ensuring that we're able to protect customer privacy and data, and that they feel they are able to do so securely within the AWS cloud.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Are you satisfied...or are you aware of what the Government of Canada's privacy framework was with respect to this specific procurement?
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
We weren't involved in the privacy aspects of those decisions. We were involved in helping integrate the security concerns or the cybersecurity standards of that. We certainly can architect to what the government needs, but the government really would have been directing and making those decisions.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Ms. Foster. Thank you, Ms. Khalid.
Go ahead, Mr. Villemure. You have two and a half minutes.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Foster, I brought up Fortinet earlier.
On October 8, an article by Rejean Bourgault was posted on Amazon's site. According to the article, the app was built in a few weeks by AWS Professional Services, with the help of partner Fortinet.
Did you have a lot of partners working on the app?