Evidence of meeting #58 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 census.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
You mentioned the effective veto. Could you expand on that a bit more?
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
If you look at the governance arrangements for Shared Services Canada, nothing actually establishes any obligation on the part of Shared Services Canada to provide any specific service or volume of service to Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada transferred its resources and was stripped of the authority to supply informatics or hardware services itself or to buy them from any third party. They had to buy them from Shared Services Canada. At the same time, nothing was ever set down about what obligations Shared Services Canada had in exchange for those resources and what obligations they had, if Statistics Canada wanted in some way in future to accommodate a program of its own, to change the informatics support that it was being given.
The result is that there is no obligation. The reality is that Shared Services Canada knows this and acts in that way in dealing with Statistics Canada.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
In what way do you mean? I know you said there's no obligation. We have no obligation to listen. We could walk out right now, but we don't. Shared Services, you said, has no obligation and acts in that way—
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
For example, the money that was transferred was more than sufficient for Shared Services Canada to maintain the capacity of the legacy data centres in line with the requirements of Statistics Canada—
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
—as they had been for years.
They decided unilaterally that they would not do that. They also decided that they would not maintain the data centres, and that they would cancel the service contracts on the various servers on which our programs rely, creating enormous risk to Statistics Canada. Though I object to all of these things, there's nothing I can do about them.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Operationally, can you give us an idea of what they did that affected or stopped you—by you, I mean StatsCan—from doing your work?
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
At the time I left, the project to revise our website services was, effectively, in disarray. We had not received delivery of the hardware infrastructure that we required. Another program that was building a new integrated collection operation system to increase the efficiency of our collection operations was also going into a stalled state. We couldn't get the capacity to deliver the infrastructure.
We are seeing more and more tiny failures of our website, for example, or of various processing systems.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
We're almost out of time. Very quickly, if you could go back in time, what would you have liked to see different, knowing that we have to operate with Shared Services? What could we have done differently or better to satisfy you?
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
I said there were three...I have no issue with using Shared Services Canada as a service. I believe that Statistics Canada needs to have meaningful control over its informatics infrastructure. It needs to be able to make the decision that it requires a piece of infrastructure to be put in place and to have it done at an affordable cost, in a timely way, and effectively.
As long as the budget has been transferred, Statistics Canada has been stripped of the authority to do those things on its own, and Shared Services Canada has no obligation to provide those services. They, effectively, control what we are able to do. The notion of some external authority preventing Statistics Canada from doing things that in its budget capability and its mandate are entirely reasonable for it to do is incompatible with the idea of the independence of the agency.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Mr. Weir, go ahead for seven minutes, please.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Thank you very much, Mr. Smith, for appearing before our committee.
You made the point that Shared Services' monopoly on informatics impeded Statistics Canada's independence. I wonder if you could speak to any studies that Statistics Canada was unable to complete or conduct as a result of these IT arrangements.
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
Statistics Canada will struggle to get things done, one way or the other, no matter what the impediments are. We've never yet come to a point where we were simply unable to find a solution, even though it cost us more money, delayed major projects, and idled project teams. All of those consequences are there.
I guess the most egregious example of how, literally, we were a failure was when infrastructure managed by Shared Services Canada shut us down for a significant period of time. It was in July. It was a failure of what was an uninterruptible power supply that should have been the safeguard, but it hadn't been properly maintained and assessed. It brought down our entire legacy data centre. Parts of it were down for a full day. That was attributable to aging and failure to maintain infrastructure. Those types of incidents are more and more likely to occur.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
That's certainly very troubling.
You mentioned, as well, that Shared Services was not particularly effective in supporting the last census, but you also noted that the problem with the website was not the fault of Shared Services. I wonder if you could speak at all to how Shared Services came up short for the census.
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
The one major piece was with respect to the dissemination, the website infrastructure that was required. I met very early with Liseanne Forand, and again with Ron Parker after he was appointed, to say that the census was a mission-critical project for the Government of Canada. It works to a fixed date. It cannot fail, and neither one of us in the room at the time wanted to see that happen.
They were also explicitly directly funded to buy all the hardware infrastructure required for the census. We never had an accounting of what the money was spent on, and we were given additional bills for things that, in our opinion, they were in fact funded for. At the end of the day, they built and put the bulk of the infrastructure in place in time. The management effort required by Statistics Canada to ensure that happened was, by comparison to that for any previous censuses, enormous.
I credit the fact that, in terms of the core operations, the major project aside, they did provide the support we needed to make the census a success, and it was an enormous success in terms of all the historical censuses of Canada.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
It's certainly great to get back to a mandatory long-form census.
I wonder if you could address whether the arrangement between Shared Services and Statistics Canada put Canadians' privacy at risk.
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
My view—and it's still my view because it hasn't been demonstrated to be wrong—is that the Statistics Act says that the confidential information holdings of Statistics Canada, the information provided by Canadians and their organizations for statistical purposes, can be in the hands of only Statistics Canada employees. There is a provision in the act that says that Statistics Canada itself can recognize people from other organizations as deemed employees but on the assumption that Statistics Canada is meaningfully in control of their activities while they are in contact with that data.
I have argued from the beginning that the governance arrangements around Shared Services, which require us to transfer to them all these confidential information holdings, are actually inconsistent with the Statistics Act and are a violation of the Statistics Act because they are not, in effect, in any meaningful and acceptable way, deemed employees of Statistics Canada. In my view, that issue is still unresolved.
Normally when I raise that issue, the argument I get back from Shared Services Canada is that we have all these bells and whistles that keep the data safe. That's not the point. The point is that, by law, they shouldn't be there in the first place.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Right.
You mentioned in your opening remarks that you made considerable efforts to resolve these problems before taking the significant step of resigning, and you spoke a bit about the correspondence you had with the Clerk of the Privy Council. I wonder if you can tell us anything more about which government officials you tried to talk to in order to find solutions, and what they said.
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
Obviously, as I mentioned, I met repeatedly with Shared Services Canada and raised the issues with them. I met with the various secretaries of the Treasury Board and raised the issues there. I've raised the issues with the portfolio office of Industry Canada, which is the portfolio in which Statistics Canada participates. I've obviously raised the issues with the minister. I've raised the issue with the Clerk of the Privy Council, and ultimately on August 3 with the Prime Minister himself directly.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Did any of them propose anything meaningful to address these very serious concerns that you had raised?
Former Chief Statistician of Canada, As an Individual
There was nothing. Quite literally, I've never received a meaningful suggestion about how these issues could be addressed, either within or outside of the existing framework. The discussion tends to go along the lines of, well, the Shared Services Canada initiative is important to us, and if we let you go, there's going to be a lineup at the door, so therefore we're not even willing to have this discussion.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Okay, so your sense was that they were receiving perhaps similar or related complaints from a lot of other organizations within government and didn't want to make special accommodation for you for fear of having to accommodate many other agencies.