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.