Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My colleague Martin Loken and I want to thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee. It's a pleasure to be here.
I'll make a few brief opening comments, after which I would be pleased to answer your questions.
Global Affairs Canada is mandated to manage Canada’s international platform. The platform is a network of 179 missions in 109 countries that supports the international operations of Global Affairs Canada and 37 partner departments, agencies and colocators, such as provincial government representatives.
We are a 24-7, around-the-globe knowledge organization, where information flows continuously to enable everything that our department does. We depend on a secure and efficient information technology infrastructure, whether it's to promote Canada's interests in the world, to deliver trade and consular services to Canadians, or to provide humanitarian assistance.
A critical element of this mandate is the provision of IT services overseas. Global Affairs Canada fully supports the government's enterprise approach to information technology. Global Affairs works closely with Shared Services Canada to ensure that a secure, reliable IT infrastructure is in place to support our department's employees in Canada and our workforce abroad.
In particular, this includes support and maintenance of Shared Services Canada infrastructure, including servers, networking, secure systems, and email. It also includes local procurement of IT goods and services such as BlackBerrys, telephone lines, and Internet service providers.
Global Affairs and Shared Services Canada share and jointly fund a workforce of over 150 Canada-based and locally-engaged information technology professionals who deliver the majority of these services at missions abroad. This approach has been effective in maintaining service delivery abroad since the creation of Shared Services Canada.
Global Affairs Canada supports the proposed measures in the Budget Implementation Act related to Shared Services Canada. In our view, these are important tools to enable Shared Services Canada to focus on its core mandate and to streamline the delivery of services in challenging international environments. In particular, the delegation of procurement authorities for IT goods and services outside Canada would allow my department to respond more quickly to changing needs at missions abroad.
We look forward to working with Shared Services Canada to examine how these proposed changes, if enacted, can be leveraged to meet the needs of Canada's international platform.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We look forward to your questions.