Government Operations Committee on March 10th, 2016

[Judy Foote, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

In terms of the money we require, the request would be made through the immigration department. They would identify the number of refugees and then, based on our work with them, we would determine what costs we would incur to do more of what we've already done for the 25,000 who came.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Minister.

Minister, I have the time as 4:32. You indicated you had to leave at approximately 4:30, so on behalf of the committee, we thank you for your attendance, and you are excused.

[Judy Foote, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Thank you. I look forward to continuing to work with the committee, particularly on the Canada Post file. If that is something the committee feels is appropriate, then I would appreciate that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, again, Minister.

For the benefit of committee members, I have two quick points. We'll find this becoming more commonplace as we go down the road with committee meetings, but normally, if we have meetings for two hours and there are two separate panels coming in, after the first panel is finished their presentations, wherever we are in the speaking order, we go back to the initial rotation.

However, after consultations with Madam Ratansi, and given the fact that we have a similar panel before us, we'll continue with the ongoing rotation, which means that the next question will be to Mr. Weir, for three minutes, and then we'll go back to the seven-minute round.

However, as I mentioned at the last meeting, we also have to allow at least 10 minutes toward the end of this meeting for a series of votes on the supplementary estimates (C). At approximately 5:20 I will adjourn our hearing from the witnesses and we'll go to the votes on the various supplementary estimates (C).

Mr. Weir, for three minutes, please, questions and answers combined.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I'd like to pick up on the point from across the table about the importance of affordable housing. This past week a troubling story emerged about the Government of Saskatchewan putting some homeless people on buses to British Columbia.

I wonder if the officials could provide some information about how quickly the federal government's proposed measures for affordable housing could be put in place in our province of Saskatchewan.

[George Da Pont]

The role of our department in affordable housing will be a support role, but a very significant support role.

To date, we have a full inventory of buildings and structures that the department has, which have some potential for being turned over to affordable housing. That is feeding into work being led by CMHC, which is taking the broad policy lead across government because, as the minister mentioned, other departments have potential properties and structures that could be used. That is all feeding in and they're leading the development of an approach to strengthen affordable housing possibilities.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Might I ask how many of those properties are in Saskatchewan?

[George Da Pont]

I don't have that information, but I'll turn that over to my colleague, Kevin Radford, who heads up our real property area. He may or may not have it, and if he doesn't, we'll make that available.

[Kevin Radford, Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property, Department of Public Works and Government Services]

With respect to Saskatchewan specifically, we have provided a list of all of our properties that are up for disposal. We've categorized them by criteria: are they in an urban setting; are they in a rural setting; are they commercial; are they possibly residential, etc.?

The idea is that we take 30% of the holdings that we have and provide a mechanism, or at least a catalyst for other custodians of property, like the RCMP, National Defence, etc., to follow up pro forma to move the program and at least understand our asset base much more clearly.

Within that list, there certainly are some properties in Saskatchewan, and I would need to dig into those and provide them to you.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Yes, could you come back to the committee with that information?

There are also some items here that we're going to look into, around the use of Canadian-made steel in the Champlain Bridge replacement. That would be very interesting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We'll go back to a seven-minute round and we'll start with Mr. Graham.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

As a former technology journalist specializing in free and open-source software, I intend to get a bit into the weeds of Shared Services, so if there are any technical staff accompanying you I'd encourage them to move up to the table and identify themselves.

First of all, of the 23,000 servers across 485 data centres the minister referred to, how many of them run on open-source software? Are we exploring a significant migration away from proprietary software models toward open-source software options as you transition toward seven data centres? For example, on the Hill, I cannot use anything but Internet Explorer because we are told that it is the only browser that meets our security standards, which anyone who has been in the industry more than a few hours knows is kind of funny.

On the server side, the various flavours of Linux make very nice replacements for the various flavours of UNIX and Windows. I want to ensure that we're considering open-source software in a serious way, as we move forward.

[Ron Parker]

I'm not a technologist, I'm afraid. I'll say that right up front. I'm going to ask the technology expert, Patrice Rondeau, to take on that question.

[Patrice Rondeau, Acting Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Data Centers, Shared Services Canada]

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair.

Open source has been and continues to be an area that we focus our attention on when we have to expand our platform. Especially as part of the workload migration in moving from the older legacy environment to the new, we're looking at opportunities to exploit open source software.

On the data center side, we have 26,000 physical servers, but we have up to 74,000 OS instances, so we have virtual servers sitting on physical servers, and I would say that approximately 15% are running Linux.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

What are the other 85% running, generally?

[Patrice Rondeau]

The remainder, you mean?

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Yes. Are they legacy Unix systems or are we looking at Windows servers or some combination?

[Patrice Rondeau]

We're running Windows servers for a large percentage. We're running all flavours of Unix. We have HP-UX. We have IBM AIX. We have a lot of mainframe capability also. The larger departments still rely heavily on mainframe computers.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Are we still using 32-bit signed integers to store time anywhere in government or are we going to be vulnerable to the Y2K38?

[Patrice Rondeau]

I'm sorry. I didn't hear the question.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Are we still using 32-bit signed integers to store dates anywhere in government or are we ready for the Y2K38 bug?

[Patrice Rondeau]

We're still using 32-bit machines, but mostly 64-bit machines, if that's what the question is.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

That's the question.

[Patrice Rondeau]

We still have a lot of RISC-based environments. We still run some Solaris, some HP-UX, and some IBM pSeries. What we inherited four or five years ago were all the flavours of probably every type of server and computer that existed at the time.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I'm always surprised to hear RISC still exists, but that's another story.

I am probably the only member of Parliament to have a PGP key, and I'm definitely the only member of Parliament to be in the Debian keyring. Will government employees be encouraged to adopt PGP key signatures, trust rings, or another cryptographic authentication system?