I'll go in reverse order. There was no baseline for RCMP services before the creation of Shared Services Canada. In fact, for the vast majority of departments there was no baseline on service levels, and that has been one of our fundamental challenges at Shared Services Canada. There was very limited information on services and assets that were consolidated at SSC, which meant that we did not have a basis for service level agreements or to measure if we were improving service.
With respect to Statistics Canada, over the past several months, we have built a strong and productive relationship with Statistics Canada aimed at ensuring that we have a reliable and secure IT platform for the delivery of their important programs. The chief statistician and the president of Shared Services Canada meet every two weeks to monitor progress on mitigating risks associated with IT.
There are currently no outstanding operational issues at Shared Services Canada related to IT. We have worked very hard over the past few months to secure their existing IT environment, and we are working on a strategy with them to eventually move them out of their old data centre into a new one that will completely meet their security requirements. All the SSC staff who work in the data centre servicing Statistics Canada are cleared to the secret level, and they take an oath to respect the requirements of the Statistics Act.
With respect to your first question about what we are doing on cybersecurity, we are using budget 2016 money to strengthen the three connections to the Internet that the Government of Canada has. This is to ensure that we can scan all the traffic that goes through those network connections even if that traffic is coded. We're also creating and building a list of applications that are safe to be installed on the shared network infrastructure. That's in addition to what I mentioned earlier in response to the earlier question about our security operations centre.
We have a computer incident response team that provides guidance and mitigation to departments in the form of information products. We've instituted, along with the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, a supply chain integrity process to ensure that no untrusted equipment, software, or managed services are procured by Shared Services Canada or used in the delivery of services to Canadians.