Evidence of meeting #88 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 results.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Mr. Weir asked the question, but I want to ask very succinctly, how many meetings has the committee headed by Mr. Goodale had? Please, no preamble, just a number.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Of the one Mr. Goodale's chairing, how many meetings have they had? We've heard it's zero.
Secretary of the Treasury Board of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
It's either three or four.
Conservative
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
No, may I...? Because you've put something out there that is patently false.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
We have met repeatedly and had calls on this issue, and we are seized with.... I don't want the number you said to rest because it is patently false.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Okay, you've said that. You're using up my time, Mr. Brison. I know you love to talk but let's get back to this, please. Thank you.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Thank you.
I want us to go back to Phoenix for a bit. There are a couple of issues. I want to point out that when Mr. Clarke talked about the layoffs, it was February 19. We were sitting in committee with you, and your department said it was a stunning success. It was February 19, yes, in 2016, when your department commented that it was a stunning success. About a month later, Ms. Foote said it was, again, a stunning success, a testament to government operations. At the same time, your government was laying off those people. I do recall that Mr. Weir and I were asking your government very specifically about keeping the legacy program going. Your officials said not possible, not possible, not possible. I just want to get that on the record.
I realize that it's a big issue, and people are working very hard on it. But I have been digging through this for many, many months—a year and a half now—with ATIP after ATIP after ATIP. Every report was showing that it was very clearly a big problem. As Mr. Clarke said, your government could have said no. When they didn't say no, and when we first brought the issues up, it was all blamed on the backlog, which your government was warned about and chose to ignore. They still continued to ignore the problem even up until July, when we called a special committee. Your government fought that special committee until the media got hold of it. That's the only reason we got your government to actually act on all these Phoenix issues. That goes back to July.
Your government ignored problem after problem. We have document after document refuting every single one of your government's excuses all along. That's what we told Ms. Foote when she was here. With all the time she's spent blaming others for this, if she'd spent half that time on fixing this we wouldn't be in this issue. The government blamed it on not knowing about the backlog, but we have documents to her in November that say to clear the backlog, which she ignored.
We were told later by your government that there was no training. We found results saying to finish the training, which you ignored. We found documents from every single one of your chief financial officers, in November, in a briefing note to Minister Foote, that it's not ready, it's not ready, it's not ready. The response from your government was that you'd report back in a month. On December 15 these internal documents, which we had to fight to get, came out very clearly: a 35% failure rate with Phoenix. You still went ahead.
It's a big problem, and I recognize that a lot of people are working on it. I don't blame you specifically, but it's a big problem and it does rest with your government.
On the issue about looking for all these pay workers, Ms. Lemay was here two weeks ago, saying that they've been looking for an entire year, but we spent this week looking through all the job postings—you said you'd just started looking again—and we found no job postings. So you contradicted what Ms. Lemay said. She said that every week, for an entire year, they've been looking in order to try to rehire those people they laid off. Now we find that just very recently you started looking for these people. I just want to put that on the record, that this Phoenix....
I'm not blaming you specifically, but I do point my finger at Minister Foote and I do point it at Ms. Lemay for ignoring the problem, ignoring the backlog, and letting it snowball out of control. By the time they finally chose to address the backlog, which was probably about July or August, or maybe in May they started, it was too late. That's where the problem lies, period.
I just want to get—
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
I certainly want to take exception to what Mr. McCauley has just laid out—
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
I have to recognize you first, Mr. Whalen.
You have five minutes. Go ahead.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
I certainly want to take exception to what Mr. McCauley just said.
We've sat in these meetings, and Madam Chair Ratansi and I had an opportunity this morning to attend a session with the the Telfer school of business on complex project management and the cultural issues associated with that.
If we look at the document that I'm going to table, it's a report from a Brigitte Fortin and Rosanna Di Paola, who were advising the minister. This is from back on February 18, around the time of the pilot project. It says, “Where are we on Technology?...Ready to Go!”, “Where are we on Process?...Ready to Go!”, “Where are we on People?...Ready to Go!” It also says that the independent third party review said, “On the basis of the evidence provided the Review Team feels that the TPA Initiative should proceed to the next phase”.
In all the high-level advice provided by the ministerial staff to the minister and the department staff, the minister indicated that the project was ready to go. The testimony that we've heard today seems to indicate that there's some type of a cultural failing within the system, whereby a number of people were let go in departments two days before the election. There was authority granted to the departments to let go their pay advisers that extended throughout this period, and the advice that was being given to the minister appears to have been patently false. We're not sure what the incentives were to encourage the bad behaviour, but it's a cultural problem that we want to address and avoid, so that we can move forward and solve the problems that not only are currently plaguing Phoenix but which also may plague some of the other systems that were put out, some of the other consolidation measures that were put in by the previous government.
When I look at Shared Services Canada—and these are some of the questions I want to ask about, Minister—you've identified in your departmental plans, or your department has identified limited IT capacity as a major risk. In October, your department tabled a strategic plan for IT services for 2016-2020. When I asked Mr. Parker about that plan, he didn't even know the name of it in the last meeting, so there seems to be some disconnect in the service of the level of risk that people around this table see regarding IT consolidation, the level of risk that your department clearly sees, and the department that is meant to deliver on the very plans that are put in place.
Can you speak to us a bit on the extra staffing and extra spending that might be required to manage, again, the systems that are in place, the legacy systems, in addition to the transformation initiatives, which were clearly not properly financed under the previous government but I think have been identified as being a real problem umpteen times within this committee? What additional resources are being put into the information technology side to manage the systems but to separately fund the changes that are required so that we can avoid more problems like Phoenix?
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
Thank you very much, Nick.
The underfunding of IT investment in governments in Canada has gone on for a long time. We have very creaky IT systems right across governments. Some departments are using COBOL-based systems, some using creaky old mainframe systems. There is an inability to share information between departments. Part of it is technological, but some of it has to do with other things in terms of legislative and statutory changes that would have to occur. This is not unique to Canada. This is not unique to Canadian governments, but it has to be fixed and we have to make the kinds of investments and implement the kinds of digital reforms that other countries have undertaken.
Probably one of the worst government IT failures anywhere, in any government, was when Obamacare was implemented in the U.S. on the HealthCare.gov website. On that day, 4.7 million Americans tried to register for health care. Only six citizens succeeded.
The Obama administration looked at that as a call for action and it created a reprioritization of IT for that government and they created, among other things, a government digital services unit—18F. One of the things we're doing as a government, and we're establishing it—it was in the budget—is a Canadian digital service unit. It is being modelled after some of what was done in the U.S. and also the U.K.'s government digital services and the Australian government's digital services.
The reality is that everything has changed in the last 10 years in terms of digital service delivery, and the Canadian government, to a certain extent, is a Blockbuster in a Netflix world. Canadian citizens want to and wonder why they can't receive the same quality of digital services from their government that they can get from Amazon. We have identified what the barriers to doing that are, and rest assured, I want to tackle those challenges one by one.
The Auditor General, I must say, in his last couple of reports has talked about government service delivery and the importance of that. Governments tend to focus 90% of their efforts on policy and 10% on execution.
We have to actually focus more on execution and good service delivery. That's going to require a lot of work and it's going to require resources. You're talking about a subject that I have a great deal of passion for and interest in.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you, Minister.
Mr. Weir, you have three minutes, and that's the last round.
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Thank you.
I think we've heard two different narratives about Phoenix from Minister Brison and Mr. Whalen.
I believe, Mr. Brison, you've suggested to the committee that all the bad decisions were made by the former Conservative government, including not maintaining the legacy payroll system. That is interesting, because when Minister Foote was here previously, she and her officials told us that they got rid of the legacy system because there was no way to maintain it, whereas Mr. Whalen has suggested that the Liberal government in fact made some mistakes because it was getting bad advice from departmental officials.
I just want to clarify whether the story is that all the bad decisions on Phoenix were made by the previous Conservative government or that your government made some mistakes but made them because it was getting bad advice from officials.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
Mr. Weir, we have an excellent public service in the Government of Canada and they provide advice to ministers, fearless advice and then loyal implementation. You may feel comfortable in throwing public service members under the bus—