Government Operations Committee on March 7th, 2017

[Graham Barr]

Mr. Chair, I believe the member is referring to data centres, which are buildings that house our servers and network equipment. There are a little over 500 data centres in the Government of Canada, which range in size from large buildings to small closets in office buildings.

As the member suggests, our plan remains to consolidate the number of data centres down to seven or fewer. We have not been able to close old data centres as quickly as we had originally planned. Part of the revision to our transformation plan that I referred to earlier is a new approach to closing the old data centres and transferring the data, the servers, and the equipment of the departments out and into the new enterprise data centres.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do you have enough resources for that, or will that be an ask a bit further down the road as we get closer to finalizing that transformation?

[Graham Barr]

Part of our revised transformation plan—on which, as I said earlier, we are wrapping up the analysis—includes complete costing for all of our IT consolidation and modernization projects, including our data centre consolidation project.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do you feel comfortable that we have the right plan and we're on the right track for it?

[Graham Barr]

The plan we've been developing as a result of the consultations and the analysis of our lessons learned is a much more realistic plan with much more realistic timelines and also a realistic migration schedule.

As I mentioned earlier, we are currently just finishing our analysis of the 2,500 suggestions we heard from industry stakeholders, Canadians, and departmental CIOs. We'll be putting that before ministers very shortly.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Great.

With regard to your service scores, do you break them down by department, or is it overall? When you said you grew, I think, from 2.7 to 3.1, was that overall, or are you able to break them down by department?

[Graham Barr]

Do you mean our customer service scores?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Yes.

[Graham Barr]

Yes, we have a score for each of the departments. The 3.1 I mentioned earlier is the average of the 37 of our 43 partners who responded to the January survey.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How do you deal with the very, very low scores? I'm sure the RCMP was not high up there, considering their comments recently. Do you have a plan to go after those, or is it a mixed bag? Some are low scores because of their infrastructure; some because of service delivery.

[Graham Barr]

We do take a very targeted approach. The implementation of the customer satisfaction survey has really helped our efforts to improve service delivery because it allows us to target specific departments.

For the departments that are in, I'll just say loosely, the bottom 10, we have developed specific, concrete action plans in consultation with those departments. These plans are aimed first at understanding the scores that those customer organizations gave us, but more importantly, what concrete actions we can take to turn them around in the coming months.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Great.

Ms. Hazen, I have a very quick question. You mentioned in the supplementary estimates (C) that there's money for new phones, new equipment. Are these replacements for current existing employees, or are these for brand new employees who have come aboard?

[Samantha Hazen]

As a part of our request through supplementary estimates (C), there is new funding of $1 million. That is to support some of the standard suites of services that we offer to Government of Canada employees. It's really money to cover the cost of new FTEs who have been added to the Government of Canada since the time of our main estimates.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Great. Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We will go to Mr. Whalen for five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for coming.

Unlike my colleagues, it's my impression that the money spent to determine Canadian values with respect to the electoral system was worthwhile. It brought us the sense that the values of Canadians did not necessarily align with any of the proposed options for change, so even if people wanted change, they didn't know what to change it to. From my perspective, I'm glad that the money was spent.

My question, really, is this: why was the request for money not in advance of the programming? Why was it not requested under supplementary estimates (B)? Why is it that the PCO is asking for the money rather than the Minister of Democratic Institutions?

[Kami Ramcharan, Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Privy Council Office]

I'll take an opportunity to respond to the question, Mr. Chair.

Budget 2016 would have identified money associated with doing this initiative for the PCO. In terms of developing the initiative, what we do is develop a Treasury Board submission to seek funds for it. We didn't develop it in time because we were still working out the details in terms of finding out what we were going to do, how we were going to spend the money, and how it was going to be used.

Once we have a good understanding of what we're doing with that, then we go forward with the Treasury Board submission. When your Treasury Board submission is heard determines whether it's in your supplementary estimates (B) or (C). The Treasury Board submission wasn't heard in time for it to be in supplementary estimates (B). The work would have been under way, we would have been developing our proposal, but we would not have had it in time to meet the timelines associated with a supplementary estimates (B) kind of initiative.

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

It wasn't a situation where you could put forward some type of a contingency amount as part of the supplementary estimates (A) or (B), just to say that you expect you're going to need $5 million for this initiative, and then make the exact request later. It required an exact request.

[Kami Ramcharan]

The budget document gives us the opportunity to say that we think we're going to spend a certain amount of money in this area. The Treasury Board submission brings it down into finer detail of what we're going to do. Typically, the department throughout the year has enough money within its base to, what we call, cash-manage the expenditures. We don't need the money right at the time we're undertaking those expenditures, but we will need the money before the end of the year because all of the other things that we were spending our money on have to happen by the end of March. We would have used some of the existing resources within PCO to cash-manage the expenditures related to this initiative, and then by the end of the year we would need to balance the accounts.

In terms of why it doesn't go directly to the minister, all of the budgets for any government activities come into a department. We are the department that supports the Minister of Democratic Institutions, and that's why it comes to us.

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

Within the department, is this the total overall spend for the democratic reform initiative, the $3.8 million for the entire year?

[Kami Ramcharan]

Yes, the $3.8 million for the entire year is the forecasted expenditure. We won't know the exact amount until the end of the fiscal year—we still have about four weeks to go until then—but that's the estimate for what we generally expect we're going to spend.

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

Mr. Dupont, it looked as though you were going to interject there.

[Serge Dupont]

Yes. I was going to say, on this exercise on electoral reform and reaching out to Canadians, that's it but there is continuing democratic reform, of course, under the Minister of Democratic Institutions and we will be supporting her.

There were some monies in the supplementary estimates (B) that will likely be ongoing, about $1 million per year, seven and a half person-years, bolstering the capacity of the Privy Council Office to support the Minister of Democratic Institutions in her ongoing mandate. She has a new mandate letter from the Prime Minister.

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

I have another small question that might link both of you together. In paragraph 2, on page 8 of the departmental performance report from last year, it said that the PCO expected to consolidate its data centres by November 2017. I wonder whether you have more insight into this, or is PCO managing its IT systems separately from Shared Services Canada?

Why is there this delta between Shared Services Canada not knowing what it's doing, not going to table the report and know when it's going to implement the initiative, and PCO saying it's going to happen in November 2017?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

If possible, please keep the answer brief.