Government Operations Committee on Nov. 25th, 2020

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

Thank you, Minister.

In my final 30 seconds I'll ask whether, in your opinion, the government is ready to protect our supply chain networks from ransomware threats against vaccine distribution. Is the government ready?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Absolutely, we're ready.

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

Thank you for the reassurance.

I have only about 10 seconds left, so I'll pass on my time. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Lloyd.

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.

Thank you, Minister Murray, for joining us at our committee again today and to all the officials for joining our meeting as well.

Minister, digital governments around the world are accelerating their efforts to support people and businesses through these challenging times we're in right now. I know I've seen first-hand in my riding how important it has been for businesses to be able to quickly adapt their work, and for their workers to adapt to be able to work remotely and provide their services or their products digitally.

I was hoping you could tell our committee what we are doing to leverage the work of the digital nations to address shared challenges in the face of COVID-19 on the international stage.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Okay, great. Thanks for that opportunity.

Committee members, Digital Nations is the 10 countries around the world that are leading in their advancement of digital to serve citizens better. It's all citizen-centric. We get together in a meeting once a year. Canada was the chair this past year; we just handed over the gavel to the United Kingdom. Officials in these 10 countries work together to identify where there are some key initiatives that they can learn or share with other countries. We partner with different countries on different things.

I'll just give you one example. I had a meeting with the digital minister from Portugal as part of Digital Nations. Portugal has been looking at single identity—in other words, digital authentication—so that people only have to sign in once and can access any government department. It was a very fascinating conversation because that is a high priority for me as we accelerate our digital transformation.

This is a collaborative forum, and the work goes on year-round at the officials' level. It's all about accelerating our collective and individual digital transitions to provide our citizens with the services they need in the way they want to access them.

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

That's great to hear. I understand that earlier this month there was an adoption of a Digital Nations charter. I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about what that means.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

The Digital Nations charter is a set of visions and principles for the kinds of work that we'll be doing going forward. We had a signing ceremony, which I chaired, just a month or so ago.

We're tackling different projects, actually, as part of Digital Nations. One project that Canada has put forward to work on collectively is about greening government. I'm pleased that we're going to be able to work collaboratively with other leading Digital Nations to find ways in which our digital transformation can also be a solution to climate change problems.

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

That's great to hear. We've set some ambitious targets in our climate accountability legislation, Bill C-12, which we introduced last week. It's actually being discussed right now in the House, in fact.

I know that you have a background in working on projects in the private sector to restore the environment, and you have worked in this space also as a minister in the provincial government in B.C. I was hoping that, as the Minister of Digital Government, you could explain a little bit more how we're going to contribute to this plan that is part of the climate accountability bill.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

As many of the members know, I've been a climate action advocate for a long time, going on over two decades. My vision for digital government is an enterprise approach, where we take seriously the goals of government as a whole, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We've been very active in SSC, for example, in looking at how we can green our procurement. One aspect of that is working with our suppliers, because we're a major purchaser of goods and services. In adjudicating these projects, we will be looking at the suppliers' footprint and what their sustainability plans are like, so that we will be influencing the sustainability upstream and downstream in our work.

I would also point to the conversation about closing data centres. There is a major reduction in electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions when there is a shift from an old data centre to the cloud.

Perhaps Paul has other examples of how SSC is working to green government and to help us meet our greening government targets of 40% below 2005 levels by 2030.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Weiler.

We now go to Ms. Vignola for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Minister Murray, in the first round, you said that once departments are ready, they will be able to find cloud service providers.

Will each department need to find a different provider? Which companies will provide these cloud services? How will we ensure data security if we let external providers manage and store our data?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thanks for that question.

My vision of digital government is that we take an enterprise approach, so that's why Shared Services Canada is organizing the opportunities for the departments to move to cloud and has been a broker and is moving in to manage that procurement on behalf of the departments to make sure the cloud providers will be providing the security that you've just asked about.

There are a number of companies that have been accepted as potential cloud suppliers. I'll ask Paul Glover to tell you a bit more about the process of supporting the departments in moving to the cloud and working with their applications, which are sometimes a big challenge when their application is not suitable to move to the cloud.

[Paul Glover]

Thank you, Minister.

To respond to the member's question, we have identified eight cloud vendors. They range from Microsoft to Amazon, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google, Oracle, a Canadian company called ThinkOn and others. That's all publicly available information. Just visit our website. It's there on OpenGov. You can see who has already been pre-qualified. There are a total of eight that the departments can choose from.

All of those vendors had to set up operations here in Canada, so they are subject to our legislative requirements. None of this data is offshore. We're working with the CSE and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security to establish the security requirements. They regularly go in and audit those facilities to make sure they are compliant with security requirements, so that we know exactly how the data is being stored and who has access to the data. These are some of the most stringent security requirements, so we have confidence that the data is there and, just like in any other data centre, properly secured.

However, we don't stop there. As the minister and others have spoken about, the path to the cloud matters. We don't want departments all creating their own networks—

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Excuse me, Mr. Glover. I appreciate that. If you feel that you have anything extra you could add to that answer, would you please forward that in writing? Thank you.

We'll now go to Mr. Green for two and a half minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

We've been hearing a lot about the greening of government, and I'm wondering.... This could be a softball for you, Ms. Murray. How has shuttering some of these data centres helped our carbon offsets? I think about what the drain on electricity would have been. Could you comment on that just briefly?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Yes, absolutely, and that's one of the good reasons to do that. The cloud is far less greenhouse gas-intensive than the old data centres especially.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I caught something interesting on your profile. It noted that you had a reforestation company and that you yourself were responsible for planting 500,000 trees. Has the government approached you on ways in which you might be able to contribute to its program to plant a billion trees, given that it hasn't planted one?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you for doing your due diligence there, and, Mr. Green, it's not so surprising you're asking about things like planting trees.

I recused myself from that discussion, because although I haven't been part of that company for a while, my husband is still involved with the industry.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

No, I'm just suggesting that. I'm not saying his getting the contract.... We have lawyers who comment on law. We have accountants who comment on finance. I'm just wondering if your expertise would help provide this government with the ability to actually plant something, given that you've planted half a million trees.

I'll leave it, because I think you know where I'm going with it. I'm hoping, if anybody's watching, that they do take you up on it, because it seems that your track record on reforestation could certainly help a government that claims to have a program on planting trees but hasn't yet.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Mr. Green, I'll put it this way: All our members and Canadians have a hand in the federal Liberal election platform, and my focus was on encouraging the platform writers and the Prime Minister to commit to planting trees and renewing wetlands, grasslands, ag lands and coastal ecosystems.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I appreciate that and just hope.... You're not forced to have to answer on that, but we'll leave that for another day.

Thank you so very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Now we'll go to Mr. Paul-Hus for five minutes.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, Madam Minister.

On October 4, your colleague from the Treasury Board, Jean-Yves Duclos, appeared before us and told us that many federal employees could not work remotely because they did not have computers. This is currently having an impact on processing of access to information requests. Actually, a small percentage of requests are being handled by departments.

Do you have a solution for this issue?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thanks for that question.

We have continued to make equipment available. I have to say that this was an unexpected emergency. We've quickly doubled secure remote access capacity. We enabled Microsoft Teams for secure conversations for up to 187,000 public servants. We tripled teleconference capacity. Wi-Fi calling was activated for 183,000.

As you know, the full public service is hundreds of thousands of people, and so—