Evidence of meeting #6 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contracts.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
Thank you.
I know that during that sequence of questioning Public Works appeared to want to make an intervention. Would you like to comment from Public Works, Ms. Miller?
12:20 p.m.
Director General, Small and Medium Enterprises Sector, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services
I just wanted to make a very quick intervention.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
This isn't going to come out of anybody's time. The chair wants to hear this.
12:20 p.m.
Director General, Small and Medium Enterprises Sector, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services
I'll make it quick anyway. I just wanted to make a very quick intervention that yes, Public Works is genuinely interested in dialogue. We've met various people in IT service branch as well as acquisitions branch. We have met with and continue to meet with CABiNET and other associations who are interested, and we have done these consultations.
The piece is the dialogue piece, and if I look back at Mr. Lynt's comments to you today, I think it speaks loudly. For instance, if 5,000 jobs are going to be lost, one of the questions we have asked is—and it says that I asked it, actually, and that it's in the notes, so, yes, I did—what are the 5,000 jobs that will be lost?
In a dialogue you need to get information in both directions. We are trying and we continue to try. This is an ongoing process, and I'm sure that when you have a session with our experts you'll get more answers to this, but that is the kind of dialogue we are trying to encourage to actually find out exactly what that calculus is and what the concerns are.
One of the roles of OSME is to identify barriers for SMEs.
For example, we ask questions of small and medium enterprises in order to find out what the hurdles are, what the obstacles are that prevent them from participating in procurement. We work very hard to find out in detail what those obstacles are.
I just wanted to add that.
Thank you.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
What you've just expressed, Ms. Miller, is pretty much the focus of Madame Bourgeois' motion that led to this line of inquiry today. So we're in the ball park here, but I think we want to drill down and do some more work on it.
Thank you.
Mr. McGrath, very briefly.
12:20 p.m.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services
I can turn to one example of where it does work and what CABiNET is talking about. It is in the area of furniture procurement. We just concluded our standing offers for free-standing furniture. We found when we were buying furniture from small and medium enterprises the price of the furniture was the same because they were going to the large manufacturers. There are very few manufacturers of furniture when it comes to office equipment. The price we were getting from each of the small and medium enterprises was the very same. The manufacturer was offering the same price. It was becoming a flow-through to us directly from the small and medium enterprises. The difference was in the cost of installation and maintenance afterwards.
What we've done, through industry consultations, is we put standing offers in place with a number of furniture manufacturers where we're buying the furniture directly but then using the small and medium enterprises to do the installation. So they're still benefiting from the services they were providing us before and taxpayers are benefiting from a bundled buying of furniture bulk as opposed to a one-off transaction through small and medium enterprises. It does work in terms of looking at how you can combine the bulk purchasing of equipment that the government is using and at the same time looking at the installation that's being supplied by small and medium enterprises.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
12:20 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
I had very little time with CFIB and then I had no time, so I've been very patient in waiting.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
I'm sorry. I may have overlooked it. Does Mr. Dewar have a bonus coming here? Does he have bonus time?
12:20 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
I was very short in my questions because I was honouring the fact that the witness had to leave.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
The clerk confirms you only used up three minutes of your original eight.
12:20 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start with CBITN. In your presentation and some of the notes I have here from it you noted that this is not isolated to the area you work in.
In fact, I've done some work on gathering data on temporary help services in this region and it's gone from six years ago spending $100 million in the national capital region on temporary help services to now we're clocking in about $300 million this year. Clearly, some would say that's fine. I don't. I think it shows that there's a lack of proper management, particularly when you look at the Treasury Board guidelines around what temporary help services are.
We hear of some movement on furniture, I'm glad to hear it, sounds to me like the shared services model that they're actually starting to adopt. You mentioned here...and I've heard it before, from people coming into my office, that they're giving up; they're leaving.
I'd like to hear from you briefly on the GENS project, because I think it illustrates what the problem is, the disconnect. I have people coming into my office who have worked in the business for many years, offer good services, and they're saying they can't even think of applying for this kind of thing. And the fact of the matter is that after a contract is given to one of the bigger suppliers, you're locked in.
I know how it works because in another field, separate from federal government, I saw this happen. It was with school boards. When they went out and bought the same systems right across the board and it turned out there were problems, guess who they had to pay? And there was only one person they could go to because they were locked in on that. There's no flexibility. So I want to underscore that point to members of Public Works here, but maybe to their other officials.
So on the GENS project give me some of the information or your response to the problems you had with that and the direction it was going, or is going.
12:25 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Business Information Technology Network
The first thing is that the impact to small businesses is unknown. What we have are some examples where we know that there has been some detrimental impact to small business. We believe that by going through this shared service, one large contract to one company, it's going to force us to have to pony up to these big companies and form new relationships, and we believe that in terms of our innovation we're going to have to all get in line with the Orwellian way. It's like you'll march this way and you'll all do it the same way, so we think innovation will be completely lost. Once that has happened and small businesses have been destroyed, there will be no turning back. There will be no industry to turn to when this all fails.
So our frustration with GENS is, number one, we just don't agree with the fundamental policy that PWGSC is proceeding with to really be a broker of services to other departments. We think PWGSC has a position to be accountable to the taxpayer and really has to put and maintain the control of the solutions. So if they want to implement shared services, PWGSC should be the provider of the shared services to that department, not a middleman to a large company.
Therefore we think that the small business has a role to play--and so do large businesses. We think that everybody has a role to play. What we specifically are asking for with GENS is to break it up into small contracts, small projects that we can bid on and be successful at winning because the bar is not too high.
We think that they need to remove professional services from the contract altogether. There are two contracts that exist today, TBIPs and SBIPs, that have been put in place and were very well received. There were, I might add, very good consultations on that, which we participated in. It took a long time, but everybody was satisfied, and they exist today. We would like PWGSC to continue to use those vehicles to allow us to continue to go after business and provide the innovative solutions, cost-effective innovative solutions, I might add.
12:25 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Just on that—I see Ms. Miller nodding, so I'm assuming you get support there—when we look at the approach that's been taken in the past....
Actually, I'll refer to a report that was done for the government by A.T. Kearney, an organization out of Toronto, via Chicago. I don't know if you know this report, but I think it exemplified the problem. Hopefully that lesson has been learned. That, of course, Mr. Chair, was where we spent $24 million for a report that gathered dust and got no value for money. It was on how to do procurement better.
I guess I would hope that there would be this ongoing, real consultation; that you would have, within government, your advocates right here at this table, working for and with you. And I say for you because here's my question: in the past, you've given us one indication of successful consultation; what would you like to see, going forward and using this office, in terms of a structure for that consultation?
12:30 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Business Information Technology Network
As I pointed out earlier, one of the problems we see...and we really did have some very encouraging dialogue, both on and off the record. We walked away very encouraged. We thought, you know, maybe we're going to get something. Then we just continued to see the same thing going through: the same bureaucrats are still in charge. Unfortunately, OSME is part of PWGSC, and policy is at the senior bureaucrat level. We believe perhaps the SME office should not be part of PWGSC--
12:30 p.m.
NDP
12:30 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Business Information Technology Network
Yes--and have some clout. Some real recommendations have been made on how to protect small business.
As well, it was put to us to put together an impact assessment on SMEs. We think OSME should be able to provide that type of thing. They have the resources to do that kind of stuff.
So this is the type of information we'd like, information to help support us. We really would like to know that we have somebody looking out for our best interest. Our belief is that it's primarily looking out for PWGSC's interest.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Derek Lee
Thank you.
I have two five-minute rounds left. We have some committee business to do as well.
Ms. Hall Findlay, five minutes, followed by Mr. Calandra, five minutes.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Martha Hall Findlay Liberal Willowdale, ON
This question is somewhat IT-related, so I'm going to address the CABiNET gentlemen first. I recognize that PWGSC may not be able to answer it, so I can wait to get that side of the answer next week.
Over the last number of years, a concern has been raised about large IT contracts going to large companies, and regardless of where the head office is. Some of the large companies may even be Canadian, but they do a lot of their storing of data elsewhere. The servers and the storage may actually be in the United States, for example. In the last number of years, we've seen interesting regulations in terms of the protection of information in the United States for data that's actually stored south of the border.
To Mr. Lynt or Mr. Thivierge, I'm wondering if you have a comment on that. Has it been a part of your discussion? Has it even hit the radar screen in terms of your concerns about some of the IT management moving, it seems, into potentially larger companies that may have data that's stored south of the border?
