Evidence of meeting #94 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 use.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Ms. Luelo, the floor is yours.
Could we have a very short answer, please?
November 27th, 2023 / 5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I think it's a very difficult question to answer, unless we understand the classification of the information you're using. It's not a simple answer. I think it's to stick within the approved set of tools that we provide to our politicians.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Villemure.
Mr. Green, go ahead, for six minutes.
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you very much.
I'm going to ask a series of questions, Ms. Luelo. I'm going to ask them in a respectful way.
It's about your tenure as chief information officer. I understand—you can confirm today—there are reports that you will be ending your time as our CIO at the end of this month. Is that correct?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
It's at the end of December. That is correct.
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I referenced earlier that we have the former president of the Treasury Board. I know that you're here before us.
I'm going to ask you for some candour, if I could, on your time as the CIO. At any time during the decisions or consultations to ban TikTok, did you ever feel a political pressure?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
None whatsoever.
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
How would you characterize your time as the CIO? I think you referenced it in a public statement, or somewhere it was published, as a tour of public service.
Would you consider it a mission accomplished? How would you consider the state of Canada's information security and the work that you did as CIO?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I think the Auditor General just published a report on the state of IT modernization. I've not had a chance to read it. I think it's a good and accurate reflection of where we find ourselves in terms of our current state of technology. We've not advanced in the last 13 years. I don't think that is a win for Canadians.
In terms of my tour of service, I feel that it was always intended to be that. I hope that other private sector leaders will do the same. It is an incredible opportunity. I think that the more we can encourage public-private—
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I'm going to go back to the question at hand, which is the study and the decision to simply ban TikTok. You've heard...perhaps you listened in on the previous panel, so maybe you have a reference to the questions that I put to CSIS and the CSE.
Why ban just TikTok?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
TikTok was one that we started with. Since then, you'll note that we've banned WeChat and Kaspersky Lab. The direction that I provided to my team is that we will continue to tighten it. We need to continue to lessen the number of different applications that we—
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I think, to be clear, you stated that there should be a division between personal use for social media purposes—and let's be quite honest; it's for political purposes that are often very partisan, when it comes to elected people anyways—and our work devices.
Is it your assertion that there should be a blanket ban on all social media from government devices to help prevent any breaches of security, referencing all of the data breaches that have happened with Facebook, Instagram and other platforms? Is that the same logical conclusion you would come to as it relates to TikTok?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I think if there's an acceptable reason for us to be using a social media platform for business purposes.... We do reach a certain type of individual through social media. I think about my 21-year-old and 24-year-old kids. They use social media, so we have to use that as a mechanism to get information to them.
As a rule, though, you have that exactly right. I would look for us to tighten up the usage of social media. There's a cost implication to its usage on mobile devices, and we have to balance data privacy, acceptable usage—
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
What's an “acceptable risk”? I found that term interesting. What's acceptable?
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Acceptable to me would be that the value of doing the thing outweighs the risk of any potential downside.
5:10 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
The value could be things like, if we were doing COVID vaccination, for example, to reach out to demographics to help—
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
With regard to COVID vaccination, then, the Department of Health could be on TikTok, distributing or publishing information, using their algorithms, to get it to as many Canadians as possible. Is that acceptable?
5:15 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
That would be an example of acceptable. There are a number of different examples of what would be acceptable, and I think it's situation-dependent.
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Okay, that's fair.
I'm going to expand it a bit further. In no way at all, during your tenure—I know it's awkward, as we have the former president of Treasury Board here—did you ever feel political pressure to make decisions to go in one way or another.
5:15 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
No.
To be clear, the former president of the Treasury Board was a great support, certainly in my tenure of working at the Treasury Board.
I would say, if I could offer it, that I wish we could go more quickly at things. We need to go more quickly at things. I think there is an overhead, dealing with all the different layers around government past and present, that brings us to where we are.
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
There was something that kind of annoyed me. I'll share this with you.
I was on public accounts and government operations, and one of my first studies was an audit on our current state of technology. I remember asking the question, do we still run things on DOS? Is it that old? In some instances the answer was yes, it was actually that old.
Of course, at that time, we had a Liberal government, which said it was going to usher in this new age of openness and transparency. There was a minister for digital governance, and then, kind of unceremoniously, they just disappeared sometime in 2019.
Do you regret that? Do you think that if we had maybe kept that mandate and that whole-of-government approach—using Liberal jargon—there might have been some headway, some kind of fiscal intervention or investment by this government to get to where you wanted to go?
5:15 p.m.
Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I think how I would answer that is that, in my experience, digital is everybody's job. This is about delivering programs and services to Canadians, both businesses and individual citizens, and when you make it one person's job, it doesn't get done.
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Of course, but that's excluding your job, right? We'll still keep that one.
