Government Operations Committee on March 12th, 2020

[Francis Bilodeau]

Right now I would identify that we're in the planning stage.

We have information around application portfolio help. I wouldn't want to give the impression that we don't have a line of sight at all around some of the systems. System applications fall within departments, so they have the primary line of sight.

The infrastructure at SSC, through its consolidation, has much greater line of sight than we used to have.

We are in the planning phases around that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we have limited time because we have another minister joining us in about 15 minutes. I'm just going to make an arbitrary decision here. I'm going to try to get the entire round of questioning in, which would mean that I'm going to ask that all further questions in this round be three minutes. We'll leave one minute each for both the Green and the NDP parties at the end. That should take us to the time when we suspend while we wait for our next witnesses.

Mr. Aboultaif, you have three minutes, please.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

What are cloud services? If you were to define cloud services, what are they?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Cloud services are an improved storage capacity of Canadian data. SSC serves as a broker so that the ministries will have access to contracts to have cloud services provided by the private sector primarily. Forty different organizations are poised to provide that service.

I'll turn it over to Madame Paquet for further detail.

[Sarah Paquet]

As the minister just said, cloud services are services offered by hyperscalers. What SSC is doing is taking the opportunity to work with the private sector to offer modern, secure and reliable infrastructure.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

How much data has the government already moved to the cloud so far?

[Sarah Paquet]

In terms of data, our journey to the cloud started a few years ago in the public cloud, where departments started developing new applications. We are now working with four pathfinder departments to start moving protected B data to the cloud. We are at the beginning of our journey.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

How much time do you think we need? In how many years down the road will we be able to be fully implemented with this?

[Sarah Paquet]

The cloud first policy is our direction. Right now, every single department is looking at the universe of their applications to see which one will be a good candidate to cloud, and they're working with SSC to migrate those applications to the cloud or to migrate them to an in-state data centre if it's more appropriate for said application.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

I have a quick question. In January 2020, the Financial Post reported that the former chief statistician of Canada, Wayne Smith, had concerns about stolen Canadian citizens' sensitive data in data centres owned by U.S. firms, which are subject to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and concerns about Washington's ability to compel an American organization to turn over data under its control regardless of the data location and without notifying Canada.

Isn't that a security concern on a national level? What are we dealing with? We aren't engaging Canadian companies. We are engaging U.S. companies on the security services that we're using right now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Unfortunately, there's only enough time for a very brief answer, Minister.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Mr. Aboultaif, all sensitive information is called protected B. That data will be in cloud services that are held and managed right here in Canada because the protection of Canadians' information is a high priority for our government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Jowhari, you have three minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Given the fact that I only have three minutes, I'm going to limit my question.

Minister, last Friday you made an announcement about the next step of the next generation project. This has been a project that I've been following since the 42nd Parliament. Can you shed some light and explain what this announcement was all about? What are the next steps that you and your department are taking?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

It's so important that we, as a Canadian government, can pay public servants accurately and on time. As we all know, there have been some challenges with that, with the Phoenix payroll system that was built in an old model, really, in terms of how we went about it as a government back in the early part of the 2000s.

Therefore, we made a decision as a government, a few years ago, to replace that system with one that was designed and developed in a different way, in a way that's consistent with digital principles, meaning that we would not just spend years putting something together and then launch it, only to find out that it was not fit for the purpose. We would actually do an iterative project where we are involving public servants and the unions, consulting widely and doing a piece at a time to understand which of the suppliers can actually deal with the complexity of federal government pay. That's what NextGen is.

We have reached a stage where we have selected a primary supplier, which is SAP. I also want to quickly make the point that, while Phoenix was narrowed and narrowed in scope to meet a budget and a timeline, and we saw what that did for us, we are not taking that approach. We are not narrowing it. In fact, this will be a hire-to-retire, full HR and pay application for our public servants.

We are now in a phase of putting together a pilot project to see whether SAP's technologies can work with the complexities of our federal government pay, and I'm not going to—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I have about 30 seconds.

The selection of SAP doesn't necessarily mean we've excluded the other two application providers. Would they be working in parallel?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

You are absolutely right. They will be continuing to work with the Government of Canada, because at this point we have not locked ourselves into the overall project with one vendor.

We have committed to doing a significant pilot project in parallel with the pay still being provided by Phoenix so that we're managing any risks of the pilot not being successful. We'll continue engaging with the other two vendors, and this will be a staged forward movement to having a pay system that really works for our public servants.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Aboultaif, you have three minutes.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

You stated that there are 20,000 technical individuals working in the Government of Canada. What does that represent as a percentage of the total number of employees?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

It's a significant percentage. I would say it's somewhere in or around 5%.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Okay.

How many people does it take to support the 18,000 applications being run by the federal government?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

The number you mentioned, just over 20,000, are people who are identified as computer technology public servants. They are the ones who would be supporting the applications—

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

How many of these applications are run by the government versus the private sector?