Evidence of meeting #133 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
That analogy was riveting. We've learned that one person's truth is another person's truism.
I have some questions on the product itself.
What's the cost of this, generally speaking? Do we know that information?
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
Yes, it started out being built by just one person. Now, it has a team of three people devoted to it, with a salary cost of about $400,000 a year. The lifetime cost over the last five years is well under $2 million.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
Are there any issues with getting timely information from the departments? Obviously, that's the source of the information here. If there are any, is there any way to help them speed up that process?
12:50 p.m.
Assistant Secretary, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
That's very interesting. As Andrew says, it's been an iterative process.
When we started out in 2013 we simply took estimates documents and we digitized them, and anything that was in the estimates was in InfoBase. Then over time we have added to this personnel information, the results information from this past year, and in the very near future, the planning information that exists in tabled departmental plans.
Notwithstanding how well the demo went, and how effortlessly Andrew was able to transition from one box to another bubble, underneath all of that are some incredibly manual processes. We don't have sophisticated data systems that allow all of this to be dumped in a database. We work from Excel spreadsheets, and we have to transpose information from one process to another. We have been rectifying that over time with departments. There's still some way to go in terms of being able to push a button and get all of this information.
It's working through some of those processes and automating them, capturing the information once, and then being able to repurpose it.
Do you want to say anything else on that?
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
No, that was a perfect answer.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
In regard to storage and security, I suppose most of the information is all public anyway, so security isn't so much an issue as accessing the information, but it could be manipulated in a way that would be potentially inaccurate, or changed. Are there any issues about that?
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
No, it's currently protected the same way everything on the Treasury Board website is protected. Any attempts at defacement would be caught by Shared Services Canada and the internal IT security team at Treasury Board.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
In terms of storage, how is it stored right now, in-house somewhere?
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
It's all in-house right now, but we are following the lead of the Government of Canada's CIO, and we're definitely looking at cloud.
The way it's currently built limits our ability to present more detailed information, and we want to change that, so we're looking at cloud to make this even better and provide even more information.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
Okay, I appreciate that.
I think I only have about three minutes left. Mr. Gibson, if you want to show us three more minutes of a thing, please do.
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
That's delightful.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Kyle Peterson Liberal Newmarket—Aurora, ON
I know your passion for the project comes through, so we'd like to hear another tidbit or two, in the couple of minutes we have left.
12:50 p.m.
Director, Expenditure Analysis, Expenditure Management Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
One of the things that we have here.... I mentioned the idea that you have program tagging. This is something that we made a big hoopla about last year when we presented to the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. We showed this new tool. What you have is this whole mix of programs. This speaks to one of the nice changes that was brought about by the policy on results.
Previously, you had a lot of detailed information that was siloed in all the individual departmental reports. If someone came in, for example, and said, “I want to create the virtual department of clean drinking water so that I can understand what the government is doing to ensure that all Canadians have access to clean drinking water”, that person would have had the joyous task of opening 80 or 90 reports and one for each year. That person would have had to go through and ask, “Is this a program related to this? Is this a program...?” It's very manual and very error prone.
What we're doing to change that under the new policy is we're bringing all this low-level information to one place. We let someone come in and say, “I want to just kind of subdivide the world this way. I want to use this tagging scheme to pull together programs.”
What we currently have here are four ways of reassembling the government into different collections of programs. The first two are the classic ones. We have appropriated federal organizations by ministerial portfolio and by just an A to Z listing, so that's not particularly interesting. Then we have two of these new tagging things. We have what we do. We kind of reassemble the government based on....
Here, I'll turn this on instead of talking about it. I showed this before in terms of that bar graph. We have economic affairs and social affairs. What you can do, though, is drill in and see under economic affairs the following activities: employment and income security.
If you open that up, you get a description of what that is, and you see all of the programs that contribute to that particular area. If you want, you can click and see an infographic. You can see that this is the historical and planned spending for this particular sub-area. We've taken all the programs under that tag, and we've reassembled them into a pretend department of employment and income security.
We'll be adding to this over the course of the year. We're going to be adding another tagging scheme: client groups. I mentioned this before. If you want to see all the programs that support seniors, if you want to see all the programs that support youth, that's going to be there.
One of the challenges with some of these tagging schemes is what's called double counting. If we go back out—and that sounds ominous, but it's not—we have this thing called “How we help”. This is a tagging scheme where we show the different ways in which a program delivers its service. Is it a program with service for Canadians? Is it a transfer payment?
Some programs deliver their services through multiple channels. Some programs support more than one client group. You might have a program that supports both aboriginal and employers or something. If you were to add up all the programs under there, it might look like we're saying that the government is actually spending three times the amount. This is why we have these warnings that say that this is a tagging scheme where programs have been tagged with more than one particular tag. We're showing the up-to amount. This is the largest amount of money that's being spent for youth, for example. These are all the programs that have been tagged as supporting youth, but they do other things as well. They might also be supporting seniors. You would see some other spending there.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you very much.
With that, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here. Thank you for your presentation.
The meeting is adjourned.