Government Operations Committee on Nov. 30th, 2020

[Paul Glover]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the member's question.

We can attempt to follow up in writing. It is quite an exhaustive list because it is not one class of hardware. We go through and identify through those things that are most at risk of failing, whether at age where we have seen performance issues and feel equipment needs to be changed out. It could be replacing storage arrays. It could be replacing network routers—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

How come these wouldn't have been in the mains, if you have known this? If this was something that was in your work plan, why didn't it come out in the mains?

[Paul Glover]

Mr. Chair, the quick response is because it was not part of the A-base, and it was asked for as supplementary. That's why we're getting it through the supplementary estimates.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Now we will go to Mr. Lloyd, for five minutes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In our last meeting last week, it was indicated that the bulk of technology spending in the Government of Canada is done by Shared Services Canada, which has a budget of about $2.2 billion.

An Order Paper question submitted by my colleague, Ziad Aboultaif, asked for a summary of all technology spending by the Government of Canada in 2018 and 2019. The response from the government was that $6.8 billion was spent on technology that year.

I have two questions. Why is so much technology spending happening outside of Shared Services Canada? Do you, Minister, have oversight over this additional digital spending across the federal government?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Digital government is about supporting the other ministries in being effective in serving Canadians through the IT and digital tools they have. Through the chief information officer branch, we have policies like the policy on service and digital, and policies on security and other matters that provide guidance to public servants in all of the ministries.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Minister, do you have oversight over the estimated $4 billion that's being spent on technology in other departments?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

No. That's not my role to have oversight over all of that spending, though probably SSC and CIOB have a very good handle on the spending in the other ministries as well.

We're the central agency that provides guidance and support through the chief information officer branch, connecting with the CIOs and their teams in all the departments.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Minister.

Something you said in the previous round of questioning really stuck out to me. I want to confirm and clarify.

Did you say that 80% of the digital government spend is being spent on small and medium-size enterprises and primarily Canadian-based ones? Is that currently the case?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Through you, Mr. Chair, that's not the case for Shared Services Canada. I think the member may have misheard that, or I may have misspoken.

Seventy nine percent of our contracts were awarded to SMEs in 2019-20 with a value of $877 million, and 98% of those were Canadian companies. It was 79% of the contracts, not necessarily of the dollars itself.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Okay. The vast majority of the dollars are still being spent on large, mostly American-based IT companies?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

I don't have the figure for the dollars that are spent on Canadian procurement, but I will ask Mr. Glover if he has that statistic.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

I'm going to ask Mr. Glover a question quickly and then maybe he can answer both.

My previous question got cut off. Is the CRA presently building a new data centre as opposed to an enterprise centre? If so, can you confirm that the procurements for this project, including the networking, will be completed within open tender and based on functional requirements and not on the same equivalency requirements?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

I will turn that over to Mr. Glover, but I want to point out that we have a mandate to provide good quality service, through SSC, that is cost-effective and secure. Where that can be provided by Canadian companies, of course we're happy to procure locally.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Minister.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Mr. Glover, do you have answers to those other questions?

[Paul Glover]

Thank you, Minister and Chair, for the member's question. I can confirm that CRA is not building a data centre. No data centres are being built. They do have workloads in existing data centres that are being moved to an enterprise data centre. Any procurements related to that will follow procurement processes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Which procurement processes: the old ones or the new ones?

[Paul Glover]

They will be the current ones of the Government of Canada, to ensure that we comply with them. There will undoubtedly be, Mr. Chair, a mix, where we have some specific areas—I've explained in the past—where there is a legacy, and we have to do like for like. For anything that is new and forward looking, we will be open with the vendor community to ensure that there is equivalency and it meets the requirements of the department.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Glover.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Glover.

We will now go to Mr. Weiler for five minutes.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would also like to thank Minister Murray and all of our officials for joining our committee again today. I want to pick up on something that was just talked about. It's quite impressive that 79% of the contracts that are signed by Shared Service Canada are with Canadian SMEs. I know that many small and medium-sized businesses face barriers when they're doing business with our government and with the Government of Canada. They often don't have the experience of working with government. They don't necessarily have the dedicated procurement people that big businesses may have. In fact, many of these businesses may find it burdensome and complicated to work within the procurement process. With this in mind, Minister, I was hoping you could discuss, in a little bit more detail, what the department is doing to tackle this issue.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

I just want to reinforce that the spending of digital government is substantial. From my perspective it's very important to adhere to our guidelines of cost-effectiveness and security while at the same time, if possible, making opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises, and particularly businesses that help create greater inclusion of some of the groups that find it harder to access government services. We're currently testing an innovative contracting framework that is called “procurement process 3.0” to simplify procurement, to promote more competition and openness, and to ultimately get better results.

We're working with Technation, which represents many IT providers, both big and small. This was the first group I met with, I believe, after the last election as the Minister of Digital Government. I heard loud and clear that innovative small businesses were not feeling that our procurement system worked for them because it was just too much of an investment and took too long to get through a procurement. We are working with Technation to be able to change the contracting processes so that there will be more access for small and medium-sized enterprises. Pilot results have shown to be very promising. More than 80% of the respondents in this pilot participated in an invitation to refine our approach. They found SSC's responses timely and the communication from SSC transparent, and wanted to continue working with us. That's just one of the new initiatives.

Another has to do with what I would consider harnessing private-sector innovation by putting the procurement out: not as in, “We want you to do this for us,” but, “We want this outcome. What are your ideas and innovations for achieving that outcome?” I think that's really an exciting approach because it will unleash the creativity of the private sector.

I'll ask if Paul has more examples of the modernization aside from what I already mentioned, which is working with associations that represent some of the vulnerable groups we want to help create more opportunities for.

Paul, are there other things that you would like to highlight?

[Paul Glover]

Thank you, Minister.

Mr. Chair, if I may on behalf of the minister, there are other groups. We are working not only as the minister said for small and medium-sized Canadian enterprises, but are also looking at what we can do for female-owned enterprises. There is definitely an issue with women in STEM—science, tech, engineering and math—so we're looking at what we can do in that regard.

We are looking at what we can do for visible minority-owned businesses to make sure they're able to access our procurement opportunities. We're very pleased and proud of the results we've had in targeting indigenous communities and indigenous-led businesses to be able to break into this space. We have let over $35 million in contracts in the IT space to indigenous....

We're trying to make sure that we target all segments of the population so that it is as inclusive as possible and that we are as easy as possible to deal with, while still protecting security and the operational integrity of the network and services we operate.