Absolutely, I would be happy to do that. My apologies if I take up all of your time; just wave and I will stop.
We did a ton of work here. It was truly unprecedented. It started with what we call secure remote access points, to make sure that we were doing this safely.
When Mr. Jones was talking about all the work in terms of COVID, one of the things he forgot to share with you is all the advice they gave us about how to do this safely. That involved setting up secure remote access points for public servants to do that.
We worked with all the major telcos and Internet providers to expand bandwidth and dedicate it in spots where we knew it was weak. We worked with first responders to make sure they had priority access to the lines they needed. It was really multi-faceted.
We realized very quickly that it wasn't just the number of secure remote access points that were relevant. It was also bandwidth. It was how they were working, what they were doing—and they were doing a lot. We had to really increase the bandwidth. We've just about doubled the number of secure remote access points, and we have just about doubled the bandwidth that's dedicated to this as well. There were big, big changes in that space.
The minister spoke about call centre operators, for example. We moved to make sure they had tablets and they had phones, so that they didn't need to go into a physical call centre. We worked with the telcos and the service providers to make sure the technology worked. That was part of the reason, in the earlier days, that we had a few—quite a few, frankly—dropped calls. We worked quickly to correct that, to route those calls to people's homes so they would be able to do that.
We also realized that not everybody needed the secure remote access, so we worked to stand up what we call the government collaboration site. It's Microsoft Office 365 and Teams in the cloud, but not secured. Public servants are still able to work together to collaborate with colleagues on a government-sponsored platform, but it is not secured. They know that. We're then going to roll that back in so that no information is lost.
We tried to give people as many tools and choices as possible to be able to operate. We doubled our video-conferencing capacity. We went from about a million minutes, a million and a half minutes a day of teleconferences, to over five million a day.
It was literally just standing up capacity. It was not just a tablet and Internet, but the telephones that go with it, the video conferencing, the security, the service to store all of the data with CERB and with more people applying. It was really quite comprehensive.