Government Operations Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2013

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I must interrupt Ms. Doucet because I was referring to smuggling across borders. Has smuggling increased? Some members have observed an increase in smuggling and firearms smuggling. There's no mention of it here.

How much money has been allocated to the problem of smuggling? What is the budget for resolving this issue?

[Michelle Doucet]

Thank you for the question.

I'll speak to the part that PCO controls. I can't speak to the part that other departments control.

With respect to smuggling, PCO focuses on combatting migrant smuggling by sea. Mr. Elcock has a mandate to coordinate the efforts of key domestic partners, specifically focusing on migrant smuggling by sea. We're not talking about land borders and we're not talking about air. We're talking about migrant smuggling by sea.

Then, Ms. Cahill, I'll just ask you if you want to talk about the PCO's spending in that regard. That would be helpful.

[Karen Cahill]

Certainly, thank you.

First of all, over the course of four years, human smuggling has been allocated $5.6 million for just the PCO portion of human smuggling. On the spending for human smuggling, in 2012-13 we spent $776,000 on this initiative. In 2013-14, as you know, we're requesting $1.2 million and we are forecasting that we will spend this entire budget.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your answers.

Mr. Aspin, you also have five minutes.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome to our guests from the PCO today.

I have just a broad question as my first question with regard to the estimates and perhaps your report. What would you regard, Ms. Doucet, as the main achievements of the Privy Council Office in 2012-13?

[Karen Cahill]

As Mrs. Doucet indicated in her opening remarks, we've had great achievements over the course of 2012-13.

The additional achievements would be these. We administered the performance management program for the Governor in Council appointees, leading further changes to this program by placing greater emphasis on achieving corporate-wide organizational goals. Also, we strengthened the leadership capacity in the public service by promoting effective programs and services to develop leadership skills within the senior ranks.

Of course, one of the great achievements is the Regulatory Cooperation Council between Canada and the U.S. This was transferred from the Treasury Board Secretariat. Under PCO governance, we oversaw the creation of release of work plans for each of the 29 initiatives in the RCC joint action plan.

On a more statistical front, we coordinated and supported 35 government bills as well. Of the 35 government bills, 24 were passed in Parliament.

Those are some of the achievements of the department over 2012-13.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you.

What is the mandate of the new public administration subcommittee of the cabinet committee on priorities and planning?

[Michelle Doucet]

In 2012-13, that committee was housed in the committees that PCO supports. As you indicated, in 2012-13 it was a subcommittee of P and P. I don't have the actual terms of reference here with me, but they had a series of meetings—I think there were 12 or 13 meetings that year—to look at finding government-wide efficiencies.

I talked earlier about being able to see the forest for the trees. When we were doing our deficit reduction action plans, every department went forward and looked at their own vertical perspective and what they could find.

That committee took more of a system-wide perspective and asked where we could make government-wide achievements: where do we find commonalities on that? They were supported by a group of public servants to aid them in that analysis.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Okay.

How's my time, Chair?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

You have one minute and 30 seconds.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

There's one Privy Council Office program that provides support and advice to cabinet committees. There are six committees and one subcommittee, as I understand it. Could you tell us roughly how many times a year these committees meet, on average?

[Michelle Doucet]

Generally speaking, cabinet committees meet when the House is in session. Sometimes they'll have a meeting the week before the House comes back. After the summer break, there may be meetings the week before the House comes back. At particularly busy times of year, around Christmas, say, or in June, just when the House is getting ready to adjourn, they might meet the week after.

It is not unusual when the House is in session for committees to meet every week or every two weeks. There is a large volume of business that has to go through, whether it goes through one of the subcommittees like social affairs, or whether it goes through the economic committee. Then, of course, there are the foreign affairs and defence streams as well.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Ms. Doucet, thank you very much for appearing before us today and for answering our questions.

I am now going to suspend the meeting for a few minutes in order to give an opportunity to the witnesses from Shared Services Canada to come forward. They will be appearing during the second hour of our meeting.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Order please.

We will continue with this eighth session of the committee and move on to our second topic on the agenda.

With us are officials from Shared Services Canada, Ms. Forand, President, Ms. Rallis, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Financial Officer, Corporate Services, and Mr. Long, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Transformation, Service Strategy and Design Branch.

You have ten minutes for your presentation. Members of the committee will then ask you questions on the supplementary estimates (B) and the 2012-2013 Departmental Performance Report.

Thank you for being with us.

Ms. Forand, you have the floor for ten minutes.

[Liseanne Forand, President, Shared Services Canada]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I am pleased to be here today to discuss Shared Services Canada's departmental performance report for 2012-13 and the supplementary estimates (B).

I will not go to the trouble of introducing my colleagues since you've already done so.

I would like to begin by indicating that SSC was created in August 2011 with a mandate to consolidate, standardize and transform the delivery of Government of Canada's e-mail, data centre and network services. This mandate was reaffirmed under the Shared Services Canada Act which came into effect in June 2012.

Furthermore, shortly after the 2012-2013 fiscal year, SSC was given authority to take on new consolidation responsibilities for the procurement of workplace technology devices, such as laptops, keyboards and printers.

Our objectives remain the same as they were when we were created: to reduce costs, build better network security, and improve the IT services that the Government of Canada relies on to deliver programs and services to Canadians.

When we appeared before this committee last April to discuss Shared Services Canada's report on plans and priorities for 2013-14, I reported that Shared Services Canada had met the goals it set for itself in its first fiscal year. Our first departmental performance report, tabled by the President of the Treasury Board on November 5, provides further detail in that regard and reflects the progress we've made towards achieving these goals.

Mr. Chair, it is within this context that I would like to present some of our main results from 2012-2013.

SSC is responsible for both operating and transforming the government's IT infrastructure. In 2012-2013, SSC maintained 24/7 information technology service delivery to its 43 federal partner organizations, including maintaining the 2,100 different mission-critical systems in support of Government of Canada priorities, programs and services, while moving ahead on enterprise transformation plans for e-mail, data centres and networks.

We began to put in place an enterprise approach to maintain and improve the delivery of IT infrastructure services to our 43 partner organizations. The importance of bringing a true enterprise perspective to managing the federal government's IT infrastructure to improve service, eliminate duplication and reduce costs cannot be underestimated.

At the same time, we've made progress on the transformation element of our mandate, which is at the heart of everything we do. In June of this year, we announced that a single solution to replace the 63 different e-mail systems across the federal government had been identified. The successful bidder for the implementation of the new system is now in place, and we are working closely with them and with our partner departments and agencies to complete the migration to the new system by March 2015.

We also completed an initial inventory of all our assets, including determining that the 43 organizations we serve rely on equipment in 485 data centres, many of which are 30 to 40 years old. We identified future requirements through extensive consultations with partner departments and industry, identified an end-state vision for the consolidation of data centres from 485 to seven, and performed a gap analysis to help us chart the path ahead.

The scope of telecommunications transformation includes all government networks and converged communications, including voice/telephony, video/audio conferencing, and contact centre services, which are more commonly thought of as call centres. There are some 50 wide-area networks interconnecting over 3,580 sites distributed across Canada and internationally, serving over 377,000 users. SSC will transition these networks to a common shared telecommunications network infrastructure. Each telecommunications service will be analyzed to meet the organization's objectives and requirements as well as to provide the best value to the crown.

Through its Transformation Program, SSC will achieve savings through consolidation; improve service through more standardized processes; increase capacity with more storage and bandwidth; and improve security.

Industry is a critical partner in developing innovative and cost-effective solutions for the Government's IT transformation initiative. In 2012-2013, SSC developed an ongoing and constructive relationship with the private sector in order to draw upon best practices and innovative approaches.

SSC engaged early with the private sector and consultations were held with vendors and service providers on an ongoing basis. Industry experts participated in discussion related to transformation principles, outcomes and methodology. The information and advice we received through that dialogue have been considered in our transformation strategies and plans.

In addition, Shared Services Canada is using a multi-step collaborative procurement process for its major initiatives, including e-mail transformation. This approach has resulted in procurements that are open, fair and transparent and that deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Finally, another major milestone for Shared Services Canada in 2012–13 was meeting our budget 2012 commitment of nearly $75 million in savings. This was accomplished through contract consolidation, leveraging the government's buying power, and streamlining internal services. The savings break down as follows: $13.2 million and $20 million in network and cellular contracts, respectively; $9 million in toll-free long distance and teleconference services; $7.5 million in network procurement reductions; and $25 million in internal operations.

As for the 2013–14 supplementary estimates (B) for Shared Services Canada, the amount represents an increase in Shared Services Canada's reference levels from $1.482 billion to $1.495 billion, which is a net increase of $12.9 million attributed to transfers to and from other partnering organizations and a small number of new initiatives being led by other departments for which Shared Services Canada will provide IT infrastructure.

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, Shared Services Canada is working to deliver on the government's vision of generating and reinvesting savings, enhancing security, and improving services to Canadians through our information technology modernization initiatives. And as a result of SSC consolidating and streamlining the delivery of IT infrastructure services, federal organizations will have access to modern, reliable, secure, and cost-effective IT infrastructure services to support government priorities and program delivery.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We will be pleased to answer questions from the committee members.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your presentation.

I will now give the floor to members of the committee.

Mr. Martin, you have five minutes.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Madam Forand.

You certainly loaded it up with some nice language at the end there—modern, reliable, secure, and cost effective—it's hard to find any fault with any of those for descriptors.

In the IT transformation initiative, or you call it the modernization initiative elsewhere in the document, the increase in storage and bandwidth, will this lead to any policy change on how much information can be retained and how much information has to be destroyed, which was the theme we were talking about in the last hour?

[Liseanne Forand]

As I believe might have been mentioned by the previous witnesses, the requirement to retain and store information is based on the provisions of laws, like the Access to Information Act, and on the policies established by the Treasury Board Secretariat.

However, I will say that our transformation initiative will, in fact, increase storage capacity significantly for the Government of Canada. It will, in fact, by our calculations, increase storage capacity sevenfold, and as well, it will increase bandwidth capacity fourfold by the time we're done. That's very important, as you can appreciate, in an era of big data. We will, of course, continue to retain the records we need to retain, but it will also give government departments the ability to take advantage of the tremendous amount of data being generated all the time all around the world.

With respect to bandwidth, of course, that will be very important, to ensure that public servants and Canadians can maximize the opportunity for contact and collaboration and networking through video conferencing and teleconferencing as well as streaming, live video-audio, these sorts of things.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

As the president of Shared Services Canada, Madam Forand, were you aware that it was policy of some government departments to erase all electronic information when a person leaves and only keep electronic information for 30 days at any time? This was news to me, and I've been around here a long time.

Is that your understanding, that it's common practice in other government departments?

[Liseanne Forand]

There are policies and requirements with respect to the disposition of records of business value, as they're called, and as you probably know.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Yes, there are. There are very strict rules. And none of them involve destroying information when the person walks out the door.

[Liseanne Forand]

Mr. Chairman, it's the responsibility of every public servant to ensure that records of business value have been properly managed. There are systems and there are programs that each department has to store programs.

The e-mail system, your e-mail box, is not really a records management system. Every department has records management systems. In fact, as a government we're moving to a single records management system that will be standard across all departments. It will be called GCDOCS, and departments are moving in that way.

Each individual public servant has the responsibility to make sure that records of business value have been properly filed in a records management system.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

In your professional opinion, as one of “the” professionals in this area, would you consider the correspondence between the Prime Minister's lawyer and another lawyer regarding the payment to the senator in question to be something that should have been saved?

[Liseanne Forand]

Mr. Chairman, as an employee of Shared Services Canada, I'm not really in a position to comment on what a record of business value is for a different organization.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

You know, we've come a long way since the days of Rose Mary Woods, when she performed contortions to erase 18 minutes of the Nixon tapes. But in actual fact, a bunch of Rose Mary Woods are alive and well, it seems, in government departments that are willy-nilly destroying information.

I understood the Access to Information Act to say that you have a duty to create documents and you have a duty to keep documents. Maybe, with this information that you bring to us today, we can get some people complying with those laws.