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?