Government Operations Committee on April 28th, 2021

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Glover.

We'll 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'd like to thank our two witnesses for joining our committee meeting today and for their ongoing service to our country.

For my first question to the witness, the opposition voted down amendments to view these documents in camera or to have these in limited distribution. What would have been the risks and consequences if redacted information had been disclosed to the public?

[Paul Glover]

The security assessment, which is constantly changing and which is relevant to the previous member's question, is material here. As we move more services to digital and online, the number of threats are increasing, as I testified earlier. This is not my data. This is from Scott Jones from the CSE. We intercept and block two billion malicious events every single day. Those are only increasing and they're only getting more sophisticated.

The risk here is that sensitive government operations could have been compromised. Services to Canadians could have been interrupted, stopped or brought down. As we have seen most frequently, there are attempts to obtain information about Canadians for financial gain elsewhere in the system. That is one part of this.

The other part of this is our relationship with the vendors who take very seriously the technology that they deploy and provide to the Government of Canada to defend against some of these security threats. If they felt that their proprietary information was being disclosed or compromised, they may choose not to or they may alter the arrangement within which we would do that. This could have a material impact on the availability and the cost of those services to the Canadian taxpayer.

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

Thank you, Mr. Glover. I think we can all agree that we don't want that to be the outcome of such a measure.

Aside from the Gartner report, your department also provided other documents to this committee last March 31. Could you speak to what those documents are and how they can be useful for this particular study we're working on?

[Paul Glover]

My attempt, as I stated in my opening, was to try to be transparent, recognizing the important nature of the study you are undertaking. We wanted to be very clear and transparent with you about where we are going with respect to the nature of the network. There's a lot of talk about interoperability and the enterprise approach. We have shared with you the “Network Modernization Way Forward” document.

I think people often think of the network as one simple thing. We've tried to include diagrams for you, for industry and for every interested party on just how complex the network is, with the different topologies. There was a sense that it was just the Cisco environment. We tried to include all of the different vendors we have in that environment and to lay out where we're going. We also included our network and security strategy to demonstrate how we have been transparent with industry about what we are doing and how we intend to go from a strategic document in the “Way Forward” to something that is more technical in nature, and to share with you the types and nature of the conversations we are having.

I also felt it would be helpful, so we put together information for parliamentarians about the nature of our work and what we've done. Given the number of questions that have been asked of me, there is a sense that we don't compete a lot of our procurements. We tried proactively to share with you the volume we do, how much of it is done competitively and how much of it is sole source, not just in sheer numbers, but what that represents in terms of dollar values.

Because of previous interest and because we feel a social responsibility, we tried to include how much of those things go to small and medium-sized enterprises. With data, we were able to target indigenous-specific businesses. Moving forward, we hope to be able to expand that to more employment equity groups, women-led businesses and other employment equity-led businesses.

Given the number of procurements that we do, while we are trying to advance that enterprise approach, we are also trying to encourage Canadian businesses of all sizes to interact with us.

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

Thank you, Mr. Glover.

I think that clarification will be very helpful for this committee, given the questions that have come up today and some of the studies we've been working on as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Weiler. The buzzer just went, so I appreciate that.

We will now go to our third and final round, in light of the time constraints we had today. We'll start with Mr. McCauley for five minutes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

To the witness, I realize this is difficult sitting here, going through this. You've mentioned national security a lot. My colleague Ms. Harder was talking about your press release. I'm looking at a request for information issued by your department, and it lists the three addresses in Barrie, Gatineau, Borden—the exact address—and then for Montreal with “to be advised”. If it's so secret that you have to withhold it from parliamentarians, why would it be on the buy-and-sell website from your department?

This is from January 22 of this year.

[Paul Glover]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. Is it January 22 of this year? I just want to confirm.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Yes.

[Paul Glover]

Thank you very much.

I think, Mr. Chair, rather than speculate I would appreciate the opportunity to investigate the specifics and to report—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I'm sorry. It was January 22, 2020, but still during your tenure.

[Paul Glover]

I would very much appreciate the opportunity to investigate this properly and report back in writing. The details will help accelerate that.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

You understand what I'm getting at. You've redacted stuff, or you've had Justice, your legal advice, redact stuff from Parliament. At the same time you're publishing it on the website for everyone in the world to see, but you're trying to withhold this information from Parliament, pretending—and I'm using that word “pretending” because obviously it's not confidential—that it's secret information. It leads me to believe that everything you've redacted here is for pretend reasons as well and not as you've displayed to us.

[Paul Glover]

I would just like to reassure the committee that my intention is not to withhold any information from this committee at all. It is to uphold my responsibilities with respect to my legal obligations to protect confidential business information and others. I definitely understand the—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

No, I understand it's not your intent, but it does appear otherwise.

On page 78 you quoted cabinet confidence, blocking out the part on incremental costs of power and cooling. How is that cabinet confidence? This is not a Treasury Board submission with costs. I would understand that as cabinet confidence. This is not a Treasury Board submission. This is not even an RFI. It's just a ballpark cost from a consultant. I'm trying to wrap my head around, again, how this is cabinet confidence.

[Paul Glover]

There's a sense that this is precedent setting. I would point all committee members to the Access to Information Act, where it makes very clear that any vendor before or proposed to be before cabinet is a confidence. That was the interpretation used. My team, under my direction, was asked to consistently interpret and apply the access to information law.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do you realize that if you used that you could block everything? You could assume everything is before cabinet. Every single discussion from every MP, every vendor, eventually has to go through the Treasury Board process and a Treasury Board submission and, therefore, is cabinet confidence. Every RFI, every RFP, every quote would therefore, by this interpretation, be cabinet confidence. This conversation could be considered that because you could then go to Minister Murray and discuss this meeting and, therefore, refuse to ever say anything again.

I find it a very shocking precedent that either your legal counsel or your department is trying to present this to us as cabinet confidence. It's not even anywhere close to the beginning of a Treasury Board submission. As a parliamentarian I'm dumbfounded at what Shared Services is presenting to us, withholding from us, or again I'll use the word “pretending” in its justification to withhold this information from Parliament.

I think I'm pretty much out of time, but I would really hope that you go back to your legal folks and have a good talk and come back to this committee with the full report to us—unredacted.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. McCauley.

Thank you, Mr. Glover, and if you feel that.... If you can respond to that in writing, it would be appreciated if you could send that to the clerk. Thank you.

We'll go now to Mr. Kusmierczyk for five minutes.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Mr. Glover, for your excellent responses thus far. I want to talk a little bit about the information for parliamentarians, the network modernization and procurement document, which I found very helpful. I want to ask you just a general question and move away from the line of questioning about cabinet confidentiality and national security.

In terms of network modernization, how has COVID changed or informed our thinking about network modernization and maybe procurement?

[Paul Glover]

To give you the short answer, this is not anything that I would want attributed to me, but there are those who have said that the COVID pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital right across all aspects of society. We have certainly seen that within the departments we serve and their level of ambition to provide services digitally to Canadians. Increasingly, we are seeing the rollout of new technologies and new services to Canadians being done at record-setting paces. Call centres used to be these big physical buildings. We had to scramble in days, literally days, to figure out how to allow people to operate call centres from their home and kit them up to be able to do that.

The network is increasingly important, moving forward. I think it's something that will be increasingly important for this country, frankly. Those who have access to the network with a strong signal will be able to access those incredible services. For those in remote or isolated communities, we're going to have to find a way to roll those out. The network is increasingly important. It connects us all. It is a way, increasingly, that government and businesses are delivering services.

Collaboration tools like Zoom, Teams and others that we use accelerated that rollout. That's created new opportunities and new challenges in cybersecurity, as I said earlier. The threat landscape is changing, and changing fast. It is getting more sophisticated. They understand that there is more volume here and, therefore, more opportunity.

From a procurement point of view, that means that, as we move forward, simplifying, standardizing while not relying on just one vendor, and making sure that cybersecurity is top of mind in everything we do will be incredibly important. That's why we talk about, and Gartner in its report talks about, those three pillars and monitoring so that we know what is happening and we can detect and respond far more proactively than we can now. That will require some standardization.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I imagine that connecting literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of staff at home as opposed to in government office buildings will be something that is prioritized or that a premium will be placed on. I imagine that working remotely has maybe changed our thinking even more. Is that correct?

[Paul Glover]

Mr. Chair, the member's assumption is correct. We had, maybe on a busy day, 30,000 to 40,000 public servants working from home before the pandemic. In a snowstorm or ice storm it had gone up a little bit, but not much. We're at about 300,000.

We don't call them “people” but “connections”, because people will connect and disconnect. We don't actually have connections for every single person, because not every single person is on at the same time. It's how we consolidate efficiencies. The numbers are staggeringly large in terms of public servants working from home, the network requirements to support that, and the bandwidth requirements, because we push more video now. They used to walk into a meeting room. The reliance on the network and on the bandwidth that's required is significantly higher.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Glover, I really appreciate how forthright you've been throughout this entire process. I appreciate how you've communicated clearly with the committee. I appreciate how flexible you have been, too, and how you've always offered to provide information to this committee or come back with additional information. I just want to put that on the record.

I really do appreciate the highest level of professionalism that you've demonstrated at this committee. You're always open to doing more, and that's something I very much appreciate. I want to put that on the record.

I have a couple of questions, but I will save those for additional rounds. I believe I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

You can hear the buzzer going just now, so good timing. Thank you, Mr. Kusmierczyk.

We'll now go to Ms. Desbiens.

You have two and a half minutes.