Government Operations Committee on April 28th, 2021

[Paul Glover]

As I was attempting to finish, Mr. Chair, it speaks to when meetings may occur and that, as I understand it and have been advised, is a cabinet confidence. They did not have access to it. For me to suggest when cabinet may or may not consider something on a hypothesis is not appropriate to be disclosed.

I can happily check with our counsel again—

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Chair, I'm sorry. Is Mr. Glover trying to say that Gartner just supposed that these future meetings might happen, and that this information wasn't actually supplied to Gartner?

[Paul Glover]

Mr. Chair, that is correct. It is common knowledge, when we are doing procurements, that sometimes Treasury Board approval is sought and that is then through Treasury Board meetings. If and when Treasury Board is required to do that is not something that would be disclosed publicly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Glover.

Thank you, Ms. Harder.

We'll now go to Mr. Drouin for six minutes.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the witnesses for being here.

Mr. Glover, I do want to say thank you. I see Mr. Davies, who's amongst us today, and I certainly have been hearing good reports from the vendor community with the work being done by Mr. Davies. You certainly did a good hire there from what I hear in the community. I'm not directly involved, but I wanted to say that through you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Glover, I'm not going to question the reasons why you've redacted. You provided some good analysis, and it's incumbent upon us, parliamentarians, if I compare it to defence procurements, to ask for all the requirements that were included in a certain procurement. For obvious reasons of national security, those requirements would not be provided to this committee, even though we asked for them. I understand why you have made those redactions, and I will accept that.

I want to get back to the issue at hand. I know you and I had a discussion back in November, just before the holidays, with regard to having.... I'm going to quote another Gartner report, regarding the whole issue of having two OEMs within the network, whether it was through the WAN, the LAN or data centres, and the importance of that.

At that time, you recognized that SSC did have some work to do in order to not rely so much on one particular vendor and to provide two OEM environments within those network blocks.

I know that SSC is now engaging the vendor community. What I'm hearing now is that SSC has done that before. It did that in 2014 through another procurement engagement, so as president of Shared Services Canada, how will you demonstrate to the vendor community that this time around you're serious and that you want to change the one OEM environment into a two OEM environment?

How will you demonstrate to the vendor community those short-term goals?

[Paul Glover]

The short answer is transparency and documentation. If you refer to some of the attachments that I included in response to the committee's request, we intend to be very transparent with you, with the vendor community and with all Canadians about what we inherited, where we are today and where we want to be moving forward.

We will also work with industry so that it understands what our objectives are and why, so that companies can think about the technologies they are developing, and we can integrate them into our forward procurements. We are also moving to open source, which will make it easier for us to allow more vendors into that ecosystem.

That, frankly, is not always a guarantee that different vendors will win. We've done two open, generic procurements, and one happened to be won by Cisco, a company that is the subject of a lot of attention here. Another one was won by Juniper.

We will be open and transparent. We will consult with industry on what we need and why. We will invite industry to help us refine our technology requirements to take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies moving forward, and we will be moving to the more open-source, software-defined, zero-trust types of networks that Gartner speaks to. Every one of our actions will be fully transparent.

The final thing I will say is that, in line with the recommendations from Gartner, oftentimes we get requirements from departments saying we have to go sole source. It has to be plug and play. They can't accept anything else, because the risk is too high. We've implemented a review committee that looks at each and every one of those, and challenges those requirements to make sure that they are what is claimed.

If it has to be specific, because it's plug and play, the risk is too high or timing, we will accept that and we'll be transparent about it. When it's not, we have a better process now to push back, rather than simply accept because they say it must be sole sourced. We now challenge each and every one of those.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I know it continues to be of great concern, and I guess they're looking toward your leadership to make sure this happens. In the past, I heard other stories about fact that, yes, we're making all of these plans and we want to implement open-source procurement or generic procurements, but because we spent the whole time planning and not meeting our deadlines, it became an emergency and we had to sole source.

How are you going to combat that within SSC and your client departments, to ensure that this doesn't happen and companies get to have a fair say and a fair chance?

[Paul Glover]

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

I don't mean to be repetitive, but it goes back to the way forward document, and working with industry to lay out multi-year plans. If you look at some of the documents that we tabled with you, they're short, medium and long term about where we want to go, where we need industry to be with us as part of that journey, recognizing that this won't happen overnight.

They have full line of sight to our short-, medium- and long-term strategic plans, and the ability to work with us as the technology changes. One of the largest criticisms I have heard from industry is that we go to them with “we know the solution”, and because of that, we turn away a lot of potential innovation and opportunities. That's why we want to work with them before we finalize plans.

The bottom line is that they will know where we want to go, short-, medium- and long-term. We will consult with them and we will evolve that plan with them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Glover, and thank you, Mr. Drouin.

I will now go to Ms. Vignola for six minutes.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Glover and Mr. Davies, for being here today.

Ms. Harder asked why Gartner Canada had access to information that we did not. Your response was that the cabinet meeting dates were hypothetical. So Gartner Canada would have made assumptions about the meeting dates.

If they are just assumptions, why is that a cabinet confidence? I don't understand.

[Paul Glover]

Thank you for your question.

I would be happy to again consult with legal counsel, take a further review of this and respond in writing.

My answer is the one that I have. It's the one where my understanding is that speaking about cabinet and when it may or may not choose to meet is a potential confidence and is not to be disclosed. Gartner was not provided with any specific cabinet confidential information. The fact that they referenced it is not something that I should continue to promulgate or include in public disclosures. That is my understanding of the reasoning.

I understand that is not sitting well with a number of the committee members today. I'm happy to review that again with legal counsel to make sure that answer is complete, but that is my answer today. It is based on significant consultation and a very serious review of each and every one of those redactions.

However, I'm happy to revisit and update my answer if I missed anything.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

You were just talking about consultations on the redacted portions of the document. Did you consult with Gartner Canada to determine which parts of the document needed to be redacted?

[Paul Glover]

Thank you for your question.

Of course, we consulted Gartner Canada to get their perspective.

We definitely consulted with Gartner, as this is their confidential business information. It is their proprietary information about their analysis of the industry and the methodologies they use to rank and provide advice to not just us but many international clients globally. Absolutely we consulted with Gartner.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Quantitative methodology is methodology. We know what that is. If parts of it are confidential, we will consult our university and college books.

You were saying earlier that some departments had specific requirements for restructuring their networks. Is it possible that those requirements may be influenced by particularly strong lobbies? Is it possible that they were influenced over and above the security issues?

[Paul Glover]

Once again, thank you for your question.

In my opinion, it's definitely possible.

Without a doubt it is possible that there is lobbying that occurs. These are huge procurements. Look at the dollar values that I shared with you that we do, and for every winner of a procurement that we do, there are multiple losers.

Absolutely, every single one of these firms employs lobbyists who are attempting this, at all levels.

It's why the integrity of this process is incredibly important to me. It's so that it is able to withstand the lobbying that we know occurs constantly.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

In your remarks, you said that Shared Services Canada, SSC, had decided to use an enterprise approach.

What does that mean, “an enterprise approach”?

And, is this just the case for SSC or for all departments?

[Paul Glover]

I'm not sure I understand your question.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

What does “an enterprise approach” consist of?

[Paul Glover]

I hadn't understood the word “enterprise”. Thank you.

An enterprise approach is one where we look at all of the departments as a whole—as the enterprise—and rather than running each individual departmental network, we want to move them to simplified standardized networks. Even when we have, for example, a lot of Juniper gear or Cisco gear or any of the others that you see in the ecosystem we have, it can be configured differently and is non-standardized.

Think about Interac terminals that we all work with every day. What if each one of those was configured a little bit differently or required a slightly different way to operate for you? We want an enterprise approach, so the user experience is the same and consistent. That will allow us to aggregate requirements to obtain a better price for Canadians, improve our service and, frankly, reduce costs over time while increasing reliability.

It's part of that Gartner.... Remove the number of vendors and move to a smaller, more stable, predictable environment. That's what we mean by the enterprise approach.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

By all appearances and according to whistleblowers, the decision to focus on a single company is made in advance, before the process is even started. How does one ensure that the process is competitive using this enterprise approach? In other words, how does an enterprise approach ensure a competitive process?

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Ms. Vignola. Unfortunately, we're at the end of your time.

Mr. Glover, you can maybe respond to that in writing to the committee, please, if you feel comfortable. It would be greatly appreciated.

We'll now go to Mr. Green for six minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, we heard in the testimony that the witness suggested there might be some alarm over what we're hearing in terms of the rationale around cabinet confidence. I listened with interest to Ms. Harder's line of questioning and Ms. Vignola's line of questioning. I certainly tend to agree. I need to better understand this idea of a hypothetical proactive cabinet confidence.

I'll state it in the form of a comment, not even as a question, Mr. Chair. We've been at this committee. Many of you know that I sit on public accounts. I have been dogged about having this government actually be open by default like they talk about. It's often the case, Mr. Chair, that we get the cabinet confidence blockade from cabinet itself, but I'm not sure that I've ever heard of a staffer or bureaucrat coming to committee to say that they have taken it upon themselves to proactively not disclose hypothetical, in a future-case scenario, information that should be readily made available to members of this committee.

Through you, what precedent did the witness refer to when taking it upon himself to use this hypothetical rationale of cabinet confidence?

[Paul Glover]

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

I will undertake to follow up in writing given the number of times this has come up.

In response today, it is the advice that I received from legal counsel that speaking about when cabinet may or may not choose to meet is not something that is to be disclosed.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Through you, Mr. Chair, whose legal counsel?

[Paul Glover]

Mr. Chair, the Department of Justice provides advice to me.