Thank you, Hicham.
Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm Louis Savoie. For my day job I'm with Bell Canada. In my part-time job, I'm the chair of the Public Sector Business Committee for ITAC, representing our industry here in Ottawa.
I'll be speaking about government enterprise network services, which is essentially one of the shared services that Public Works is trying to get under way and concerning which I believe you've been asked to review, slow down, and possibly even stop the procurement from going forward. I want to make sure that you understand what it is and what benefits could derive from it to the Government of Canada.
Today the Government of Canada has 110 or 120 departments and thus that number of networks; everybody more or less builds their own. If I could compare it to your home, if you are a family of five, everybody at home has a car, but in a family of five you might not actually need five cars. You might only need three, and people would be able to share the pool of cars to get around. Networks are somewhat the same. The Government of Canada has bought 120 or so networks, and there's an opportunity to consolidate that infrastructure into a single enterprise-wide infrastructure.
We've seen this happen in other, provincial governments and we've seen it happen in the private sector over the last number of years. It is a very natural thing to do to try to achieve economies and deliver better service to your stakeholders.
Who delivers those services? Mainly you will see Bell Canada, Telus, Allstream, and Rogers delivering these services today. You're not seeing small and medium-sized business delivering networks today. It is a capital-intensive business.
Why should the government proceed with GENS? It's a cost-effective approach to delivering a common set of telecommunications networks. These networks enable collaboration within a department, collaboration between departments, and the elimination of duplication to which I've alluded. Because we're talking about one network, we're talking about an ability to more effectively secure the infrastructure.
When you secure a communications network, you also secure the information that travels on the network and the information that's at the end of the network. As you know, today cyber threats are increasing at an alarming rate.
From what we understand, the government's proposed procurement approach is value-based and outcomes-based rather than based on buying the parts piecemeal and building, integrating, and managing it yourself, which is what the ICT industry, generally speaking, supports the government doing.
You also have an opportunity to buy best practices. We serve many customers. We see a lot of other requirements and so are able to deliver the services and these best practices to you through the procurement approach of creating an integrated enterprise network.
What GENS is not is a staff augmentation project. We're not talking about just bringing people on to fill jobs. It's not a high-risk project. We deliver infrastructure projects of this nature to other customers—and to the government: we just do it 120 times, instead of doing it once, in perhaps a bigger way but a way that meets the requirements across government.
It will not reduce ICT jobs. Depending upon who wins, the jobs might move, but the jobs are required to deliver this. One of the things you should know is that in our business and in our industry generally speaking—not only Bell's and not only the telecommunications industry, but the ICT business, certainly among large businesses—we have an echo system of small and medium-sized business that we leverage to deliver our service on a pan-Canadian basis, and this won't reduce the volume of SME business.
The Government of Canada currently spends approximately $5 billion on ICT, and all we're talking about is consolidating the telecommunications spending. What we're hoping is that you will reinvest in other ICT projects to improve the way government delivers services to citizens at large.
Let me leave you with a summary and a key message. ITAC represents most of the ICT business industry in Canada. We work closely in consultation with the Government of Canada. We support shared services. We also support a competitive and consultative procurement process to achieve benefits for the Canadian taxpayers.
We would request that you let GENS and shared services go forward. Our industry needs the government to continue investing in ICTP projects and infrastructure for itself to support our industry during these difficult economic times. These investments are not wasted. They will help you deliver better services to the Canadian taxpayers.
Thank you very much.