Government Operations Committee on Feb. 13th, 2018

[Kirsten Tisdale]

Well, I still look back at those four or five years as the best years of my career, because you can get something in the public sector that you can't get from any private sector organization, and that's the ability to make that kind of impact. You will find the people who are motivated by that. They can always make more money somewhere else—of course they can—but they're motivated by the ability to make impacts,. You'll nurture them and you'll grow them. You'll lose some, but you have to plan on that. You'll always lose some.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you.

I have a question for Mr. Murphy, which you'll have to answer in 30 seconds, I presume.

The Phoenix system, which is the elephant in the room—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Good luck with this one.

[An hon. member]

How can you answer that in 30 seconds?

[Dan Murphy]

I'm down to 15 seconds now.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

No, no, I don't want to lose time.

Your suggestion was to go small or to tell the company that this is what you want: 143 systems streamlined into one. How many people would have bid if they didn't have a 500-page RFP?

[Dan Murphy]

I don't think I would have done a 500-page RFP.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

I know we don't like it either.

[Dan Murphy]

I would say we want to do a system that pays people, a payroll system. Often, though, we end up starting with the solution. We say we want this specific solution. No, it's that we want to pay people, and what are the most important things? Well, they have to be paid on time, and extremely reliably.

In government we have about—

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

I guess the political interference was that we wanted savings, because if we streamlined this, we'd get $70 million a year or whatever.

[Dan Murphy]

So now do we want savings?

Think about it. Now that we've implemented, do we want savings? No. We want reliable paycheques that come on time.

Consider all of the variety in the government on policy for all the different departments. RCMP and DND are vastly different. Everybody is vastly different. Maybe over time you wanted standardization, but again it comes back to what you are trying to get. What is it that you want? That clarity of vision up front is extremely important, especially in government.

Then, as Mr. McCauley said, to have that interfered with politically really throws a wrench into the machinery.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Perfect. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you all again for being here. Thank you for your contributions, your observations, your recommendations.

It's been interesting. This has been a fairly exhaustive study, but we're starting to get a fair amount of clarity and commonality about what all of our expert witnesses have suggested as the SME approach that the government should be taking. I'm quite confident that our final report, when it is tabled in government, will have a pretty clear road map of recommendations for this government, and hopefully future governments as well, when it comes to procurement and SMEs.

Should you have any additional information that you think would be of benefit to this committee as we continue our deliberations, I would suggest that you make those recommendations directly to our clerk. I can assure you that we'll have them incorporated into our final report in some fashion.

Once again, thank you so much for your contributions. You are excused.

Colleagues, we will suspend for only two or three minutes and come back for a very quick piece of committee business.

[Proceedings continue in camera]