Government Operations Committee on June 12th, 2019

[Glenn Purves]

—public servants who are sitting across the table at committees are able to respond on issues. In other words—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I'm sorry, Mr. Purves but we'll have to leave it at that. If you wish to give—

[Glenn Purves]

I think it's the opposite of what you're saying.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I think we'll agree to disagree.

[Glenn Purves]

Fair enough.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Drouin, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I don't think I'll need five minutes.

I know this morning there was an announcement about the next generation payments system when I was driving. I heard some key words about a pilot project and making sure there's a parallel system. I can see that we're learning. We've obviously learned from the Phoenix pay system, and I was wondering.... I'm assuming....

Ms. Manchevsky—did I pronounce that properly?

[Jacquie Manchevsky, Corporate Secretary, Next Generation HR and Pay Team, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Yes, that's excellent.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Can you update this committee on where you want to go with this particular pilot project and what the next steps will be over the next year?

[Jacquie Manchevsky]

Sure. Maybe I'll take you back to two budgets ago. There was $18 million set aside to stand up a team that was going to look at options and recommendations. At the time, the set-up was around pay and the replacement of Phoenix. What I would say is that as we got out there and started working with vendors, it became very clear to us there really isn't such a thing. You typically would buy an HR and pay system, and so the next generation HR and pay team came into being.

The team was led by Alex Benay, but was very much supported by OCHRO and Nancy Chahwan, the chief human resources officer. It started as a team, a very small team, that was going to use an agile procurement process, which I'll talk briefly about, to identify options moving forward.

The team did a few things. One was looking at lessons learned. We had the benefit of looking at other jurisdictions, Australia, California and Alberta, and also at Phoenix and at recommendations in OAG reports to look at lessons learned and what we could do differently.

The other thing we did was to engage civil servants; we engaged government departments and HR professionals to identify what some of those key things were as we move forward.

Then there was the agile procurement process. The way it typically works in procurement, as I think most of you would know, is that the government hunkers down and writes down a series of business requirements in a little cave, and then sends them out. It goes out to the vendors, and the vendors are trying to figure out what government means. There are long blackout periods. By the time the whole thing is done, nobody has actually spoken to each other, and it's years later, and of course what you've asked for is typically outdated.

What this process does is that it allowed us to kick off with an industry day back in the fall when we talked about a process wherein we would, in fact, do it through a series of gates. We weren't going to hunker down; we were going to sit down and identify through each gate...and down-select vendors.

Gate 1, which was last fall, leaned on digital standards. The digital standards include, of course, security, official languages and accessibility, but there is what I like to call the non-digital of the digital standards, which says that thou shalt consult the client, thou shall be iterative, thou shall be agile and thou shall be in the open. We had really embraced all of those standards. Gate 1 was about whether vendors could meet those standards.

Seven vendors applied through gate 1, and very quickly we down-selected five into gate 2. Gate 2 was all about the testing. We brought in subject matter experts from across government. Those were executives. We brought in user testing. We ran user testing in lobbies. We had public servants from coast to coast to coast testing it. From that, we were able to down-select three vendors from gate 2 to gate 3.

I should also say that the interesting part about this process is that, because of its openness, we sat with vendors and defined what those requirements were. That was very helpful to us because, as government, we don't know what the latest and greatest is out there. Vendors were sitting with us and saying, “You don't really mean that; what you mean is this”, so the gates would change, and the requirements would change within the gates. We had unions in the tent. The unions helped us define what those requirements were. They sat and did the bids with us as well.

The objective of gate 3 was to do two things. We achieved part one today, which is quite exciting. The first objective was to qualify up to three vendors we could draw on. We realized early on that government isn't homogenous. The possibility of our using one system across the Government of Canada is unlikely.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Yes, so is it like a standing offer, and you can pick and choose.

[Jacquie Manchevsky]

Yes, that's how I define it. My procurement colleagues have a very different.... But, yes, in my mind it's this ability; it's a standing offer. These are leading-edge companies that we can call on for a whole raft of things. We realize that it's not going to be a one size fits all. They are going to be some government departments that will be looking for something different.

Today we were able to advise on the three companies. The next phase will be the first problem that we're going to launch, which is identifying a vendor that we will want to move forward with to look at piloting HR.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Great, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, is there anything else?

Mr. Blaikie, you will have the last intervention.

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

Madam Yip had a question she wanted to ask.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I'm sorry, I didn't have that down here.

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

Oh, you didn't? Sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We'll go Mr. Blaikie and then back to Madam Yip.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I just want to come back to some of these questions in the estimates.

What I'm hearing—and you can correct me if I'm wrong—is that in these votes, whether it's the central vote, the budget implementation vote from last year or a corollary in this year's estimates, the expanding government-wide initiative votes essentially are being constructed this way because government wants to be able to do its program design and then spend the money right away. It's a timing issue. You used that word earlier, that it's really about timing. The idea is that, as soon as program design is done, the money has already been approved, and off we go.

Is that a fair characterization of the reason these large votes are being presented to Parliament for approval prior to program design being complete, or even begun in some cases?

[Glenn Purves]

I would emphasize implementation. Making sure of the design and the implementation, making sure that the funds are dedicated to the right departments in certain circumstances with respect to vote 10, and are identified for the right votes is appropriate. There are times when many initiatives are ready for a decision but certain implementation parameters still need to be worked out. If you want to say—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

But in some of these cases, we're talking—

[Glenn Purves]

—it's purely a timing issue, I would say it's more about making sure that the funding that is approved is targeted and directed in the best way possible.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Yes, but I just don't see how we can be asked to approve funding when even the broad lines, in some cases, aren't already established. Don't you think it's an odd control? Parliament is supposed to be about spending control. We're supposed to challenge government on whether or not the way it's proceeding with a particular policy objective actually makes sense. Since this government came in and these estimates were formed, the tendency has been to ask Parliament to approve more funding with less information about how the money will actually be spent.

The only thing I've heard that approaches a justification for that is that we want to be able to spend the money as soon as we have the program design so that there's no time-lapse between when the program design is complete and the authority is granted by Parliament. I don't find it a compelling argument. You talked about the end of the supply cycle and that there are only so many supplementary estimates. In fact, the government's own estimates reform has caused there to be fewer ordinary supplementary estimates and therefore fewer opportunities to come for spending authorities after program design has been complete.

There's no restriction in the Standing Orders on how many supplementary estimates the government can bring forward or when it can bring them forward. In fact, the government can adopt supplementary estimates as an order of the day, as a government order in the House, and cause votes to happen outside the ordinary supply cycle. I mean, there is a supply cycle that's set up. That's helpful, obviously. It's routine. But it seems like the habit of government, of having only three supplementary estimate cycles and now two, has become canonized in a way that's not true of the....

I guess what I'm really driving at is that I have been objecting to the way government has reformed the estimates process in this Parliament. That's not a secret to anybody sitting at this table. I don't think it's a secret to almost anybody who's been paying attention to this. My principal objection has been that government is coming to Parliament with less information about how it actually plans to spend money. It has the blurb from the budget; that's nice. Mr. McCauley cited a document that I cited at the last meeting that actively encourages departments to respond to detailed spending questions with the high-level blurb from the budget. I mean, that doesn't help parliamentarians do their job.

What is the justification for moving to a system that makes it impossible in principle for parliamentarians to ask questions about how the money will actually be spent? Why are we doing this? It's undermining parliamentarians' ability to do their job. I want to know what the win is. I can speculate as to what it is. People familiar with politics would say that this creates opportunities for government to play fast and loose with other people's money. That's what happens. And that's true of not just government. In any organization where you don't have executives who are prepared to answer detailed questions about what they plan to do with money, you run into trouble.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Mr. Blaikie.

I won't ask you to make any kind of response, as we're completely out of time. However, it's a legitimate question—

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

It's frustrating.