Thanks, Mr. MacKinnon.
There has been certainly commentary in the public about the emergency we've been responding to with so much increase in digital tools and secure digital tools, and how that will translate into changes post-COVID. We are certainly thinking about what might be a strategy for going forward post-COVID.
I think we've all been surprised, and pleasantly surprised, as you mentioned, by how quickly we as a government were able to continue to serve Canadians, and not just that, ramp up service. As we know, almost a million Canadians applied for the CERB on day one.
I see this as a continuum. From 2018's budget of over $2 billion over five years there has been a very concentrated effort to have a more integrated approach to our information storage use and our digital government. That was an SSC budget. There has been a half a billion dollars put into the whole arena of cybersecurity and the creation of a collaborative approach to cybersecurity, which is really serving us very well as a government right now. On some of those building blocks of addressing the old data centres and migrating them, I think about 40% have now been migrated to modern data centres and the cloud.
Some of these fundamental pieces that may have not been given the attention they deserved over the years have really been a key focus of this government, which is what the ministry of digital government is all about. It's to continue focusing on better serving Canadians. Really, what we know is that it just is not good enough if the only channels the public has to get service from their government is through downloading PDFs and faxing documents, or potentially standing in line and waiting to see someone.