Evidence of meeting #5 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was digital.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:15 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Shared Services Canada
They were created by the government over the years, when each department was responsible for its own infrastructure.
9:15 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Shared Services Canada
After they were set up, they were consolidated, and part of our job is to close more of them.
9:15 a.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
What does this consolidation into seven centres mean in terms of financial and real property investments? I gather that these data centres are somewhere in a building.
9:15 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Shared Services Canada
The strategy for the consolidation into seven centres has been revised to focus on the health of applications and their location. Four enterprise data centres were created. The goal is to consolidate these data centres and all the—
9:15 a.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
I'm not denying that's important. What I'm asking is how much that will end up costing. Will those investments translate into real savings?
At this time there are four centres, and we want at most seven. When will all this be completed and where are these centres located?
9:15 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Shared Services Canada
The data centres are spread across Canada. The strategy to close them is two-pronged. Some of them are nearing the end of their leases or are simply very old. Instead of modernizing them, we will consolidate the information and migrate it to other data centres. Other data centres are older and more at risk. Those are the ones we will want to migrate.
We do not have a clear plan as to when the seven centres will be completed or how much money this will save us for the simple reason that we are working based on priorities.
I would also like to tell you about the space we will be saving. This is really what will enable us to calculate our actual savings. The new data centres are much more efficient, not only energetically but also in terms of the square feet of space they occupy in buildings.
9:20 a.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Okay.
I also saw that you are using a cost-recovery approach. When agencies or departments use SSC's services, they are billed and must pay SSC, as I understand it.
How effective is cost-recovery, given that the money is coming from the government? That money comes from a big pocket. For example, when Health Canada is billed for the services it uses, the money ultimately goes from the left pocket to the right pocket.
How can the cost-recovery approach save the government money?
9:20 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Shared Services Canada
It's a matter of controlling spending. Departments need to plan how they use services and determine what part of the services they will want to use over the year. Some of the key services are exclusive to Shared Services Canada. They are provided. Other services for which there is varying demand across departments are provided partly on a cost-recovery basis.
9:20 a.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Okay.
You have certain critical programs. For me, the definition of "program" involves a planning component, and the term "critical" means it's important. We can't do anything without this critical aspect. You are asking for supplementary funding for the delivery of critical SSC programs. I don't understand that.
If these are critical programs that enable SSC to deliver on its mandate, why aren't they in the Main Estimates?
If I understand correctly what a critical program should be, why is additional funding being requested for programs and services that should have been planned in advance?
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC
From the beginning, Shared Services Canada was not properly funded, because in 2011-12 about a quarter of a billion dollars was cut from its budget. The organization struggled in the beginning to provide the services. Our government put in substantial money in 2016 and 2018 so that Shared Services could actually deliver services of IT and information management to the whole of the Government of Canada.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
9:20 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you very much.
I appreciate the preceding question. I think I'll pick up on that, because it certainly speaks to a recent article that talked about some of the legacy IT industries. It talked about how the complex array of existing programs and services means that future changes continue to provide Canadians with programs and services they expect, but there are significant pressures on these systems. You're facing some pretty significant challenges. This article cites that part of this problem is that officials didn't look to upgrade these old systems as long as they continued to work.
At another committee, the public accounts committee, I asked the Auditor General about the nature of the legacy technology they had. They stated that they were actually running on some DOS systems.
In your mandate letter, you were asked to identify all core and at-risk IT platforms. How do you define “core and at-risk”, and how does this definition vary between federal organizations? Are you running on DOS still?
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC
DOS, Cobalt...yes. The reality is that there is work that we need to do. We, as the Canadian government, are completely committed to putting the Canadian at the centre of what we do. As I was saying earlier, that's not just a technical change we need to make. It's a continuing cultural change to work across government and focus on Canadians.
Yes, there is a deficit in some of these older applications, some of the older software that has accumulated through the lack of investment over 15 to 20 years. The Auditor General pointed that out repeatedly and our government listened. That's why so much money has been dedicated to SSC, to do the foundational infrastructure and to upgrade step by step by step, but it's also why we recognize that it's not enough.
This focus on digital government is about bringing together all of the parties so that we don't have the policy-makers separate from the deliverers and CDS—
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I have only six minutes, so I'm going to roll on to the other questions. I appreciate that.
I want to get specific. I want to know how many “core and at-risk” systems and platforms you have identified to date and what the estimated cost is of updating all the identified systems.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC
I'll pass that, and perhaps also your question on how we define “core and at-risk”, over to Madam Paquet.
9:25 a.m.
Acting Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
The minister's mandate letter does talk about “core and at-risk”. There is no formal definition in policy, but this could generally be understood as being systems that support significant and important services and systems that are aging, as a result of which we could potentially have outages, or we might have a limited capacity to update them and meet policy objectives because of the aging systems. This is something that's been put in the mandate letter. While there's no formal definition of this, there is within policy a definition around “critical services”. Those are generally defined as the ones that have an impact on the economy and the health and safety of Canadians.
We've now launched an exercise where we're trying to more systematically identify them. We have some information around application health. Recently, the clerk established a DM committee on core services. The minister, as well as this committee, will be working to more systematically identify those larger systems that are aging and at risk. We do need to know the number.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
My concern is that we have departmental reports and results that have objectives and aims, yet we have no real key performance indicators to be able to measure the progress of the department if we haven't identified already what we're going to define broadly across the services as being at risk. Critical failure in IT is a national security issue. I'm hearing about DOS and I'm hearing about these old legacy systems. I worked at a bank—I won't name it—that ran DOS, and it was a nightmare. That was almost 10 years ago.
Once you've completed this task, when can we expect an update back to this committee, once you have clear definitions, so that when we go to reflect on the progress of your department, we can actually see what has been done in this critical space? Right now, I'm not hearing a very comfortable answer in terms of being clear about just what kind of stage of critical “rusting out”, I think they're calling it in your briefing letter, we're facing here.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC
Part of what digital government is now about is measurement. We need baseline measures, and we do have the process of having departmental plans and reports. I think you're absolutely right. We need to do this based on the numbers. As we accomplish this inventory, we will certainly have that reflected in it.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Is there a time frame?
While I have my 10 seconds, do you have a time frame for when you are going to report back?
