Government Operations Committee on July 28th, 2016

[Marie Lemay]

This would be on top. Also, we're looking at how we can work differently, either with partner enhancements.... We might have additional costs there, remembering again that the savings that were supposed to occur this year were in the order of $70 million, and in every year from now on.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Right. I just wanted to see if it's in that total.

Maybe we can just walk back quickly. You mentioned that we did an earlier testing of 16,000 test cases. Did I hear right that before we went live, we did 16,000, but there were some issues involved so we pushed the implementation back? Was that correct?

[Marie Lemay]

Yes. Maybe I'll let Mr. Liddy walk you through it.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

If it's correct, then what was the date of the testing?

[Gavin Liddy]

On the testing, there was a May 2015 checkpoint, meaning that we would make a decision on whether we would go live in October and December, which were the first implementation dates. At that point in time, we'd been at it for about 70 months. It was a 79-month project.

At that point in time, we found too many critical defects in the system to risk going with either the pilot or going live. That is when we started to engage, at least at my level, with IBM to get through those defects. By September we felt we had cleared all of the defects that were critical. There were still a number of outstanding ones that we could have workarounds for, including having more people in the pay centre. We were actually using the pension centre to augment that as well.

The next effort was to try to get that number of people down and really hold IBM's feet to the fire to deliver the system without defects. By September we felt we had cleared those defects and that any of the remaining ones would not have an impact on the system, or that we had effective workarounds to deal with them. We worked all the way through until mid-January and cleared those defects progressively from September to mid-January.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Was it at that point in mid-January? I ask because you commented earlier that all the ADMs across the spectrum said, “Yes, let's go”, after you cleared all of those.

[Gavin Liddy]

Yes, we were really focused on cleaning the backlog. Part of the September discussion that we had with the deputies was whether we could clear the backlog and whether their people were ready. We had a lot of training packages. I think we now know that they were probably not adequate. We had a lot of change management that we were trying to get the departments to do as well, so that was it.

Then we went through the fall managing that in regular consultation. Rosanna was talking about weekly meetings. I had meetings with heads of HR and chief financial officers.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I don't expect you to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Your time is up.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That's five minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

It's more than that, Mr. McCauley.

Mr. Grewal, for five minutes, please.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

I have only one question, Deputy Minister Lemay. It's very much focused on my colleague's question on resources and resource allocation, to make sure that we can try to do better than we're doing right now. I know a lot of progress has been made and that the focus has always been on getting these people paid.

Is there anything else, from a resource perspective, that we could be doing to get these people their paycheques more quickly? As my colleague said, the average person affected by this will say, “Okay, I worked so I should get paid. Why can't they just cut me a cheque?” That's my rationale as well, because I'll give you a personal example.

When you become an elected member of Parliament and you're on-boarded—I wonder who signs our paperwork, by the way—your first paycheque comes in the mail, even if your information hasn't been sent in. So there is a process in the government already that has cheques printed somewhere in the government. Why isn't that process being used here in emergency situations?

[Marie Lemay]

I will say to you that the one part where I want us to focus more attention, or to drill down, is really on that portion of it—I'll call it the “onboarding”. I talked about the students, but it's not just the students—and really getting to the bottom of whether there are other things we can do. That will be a separate.... We'll put a little bit of a team on that because it seems to be an issue that is really there and that we really have to get resolved.

In the meantime, though, again—and this is fairly recent—the people who do not get paid now have a process to get to us and to get their paycheque fairly quickly, and if it's not fast enough there is the emergency salary advance.

In terms of adding resources, I would say that we are hoping to get more compensation advisers, because the call is out there. We will take as many as we can get. Also, in terms of resources, we're going to be really focusing on training, which is another set of resources.

We are going to be working differently with IBM, too. We've had serious conversations in the last few weeks about really partnering with them, and they have a real desire to see this succeed and absolutely want to help.

As I say, there are a number of things in terms of resources, whether they are human or financial, that we will be putting toward the project. That's why addressing the full amount of the cost will probably have to be for another committee meeting, but there are a number of pieces that we're looking at.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Mr. Chair, if it's okay I'll pass the remainder of my time to my good colleague, Mr. Whalen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Absolutely, you can cede your time to Mr. Whalen.

Mr. Whalen, you have a couple of minutes.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

I want to follow up on some of the earlier questions and look back a little bit, because I want to make sure that we're appropriately staffed going forward.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the decision to delay implementation of Phoenix by four months and the termination notices sent out two days before the election on October 17—whether or not the decision to delay had become de-coupled from the staffing, and how that decision was made—because I want to make sure that we maintain staffing levels until this problem is resolved and people get paid. It seems to me that the decision on October 17 to terminate employees should have been tied more closely to when Phoenix was going to roll out.

Maybe Mr. Liddy can speak to that.

[Gavin Liddy]

It absolutely was tied to that, because those people—and Rosanna, you can correct me if I'm wrong—would have been laid off earlier. We actually delayed laying people off, because we made the decision in September to delay the rollout by four months, so the lay-off notices were delayed in that case.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Were they delayed by four months?

[Gavin Liddy]

I don't know the specifics.

Rosanna, do you know?

[Rosanna Di Paola]

It was department by department. Every department decided when the layoff notices would go out, so it was not a central decision.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

So even though the decision on whether or not to roll out Phoenix was centralized at four months, it sounds like the notices went out quite a bit earlier than that.

[Gavin Liddy]

It depended on the department, though. If department A were going to roll out in October, they would have laid people off much earlier than October. Some departments decided to keep compensation advisers as a buffer, and others decided to keep 10%, 20%. So it depended on what the department thought the risks were and the complexity of their pay. I know that Health Canada kept on compensation advisers within the department because of the number of people on northern allowances, nurses, and that type of thing.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

I can sort of see where our 20,000 backlog might have come from.

I want return to the earlier questions to Ms. Di Paola. You were talking about the pilot period, the 34 departments. It seems to me that the departments chosen were the ones most closely aligned with Phoenix already and that it wouldn't have been a representative group by which to judge how the project would roll out across departments that weren't so closely aligned with Phoenix. Do you think using a pilot project on a more closely aligned subset of the departments actually created false expectations when they didn't show the same number of errors that we're seeing now?

[Rosanna Di Paola]

Although we went live with that first grouping to keep the rollout tight and we couldn't explore a variety of potential issues, all departments joined us during our testing phase. We had a 15-month testing phase and all 101 departments.... We had a variation of departments that came in to test with us. The 34 departments did include the vast majority of the automated rules that we had in Phoenix. That was what made them so attractive to go live with. So the 80,000 business rules we programmed into the system were almost entirely used up during that rollout. Nothing new was added to Phoenix in the second rollout. It's the same software, only rolled out twice.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you. I have to interrupt there. Again, if you have subsequent or follow-up questions, we'll get to them.

I have Mr. Richards on my list, but seeing that Mr. Richards has departed, we'll go to Mr. McCauley.