I think the point around holding ministers to account for these kinds of failures is really important, and it's something that we've seen in other jurisdictions where there was a massive change in thinking about how to work with vendors and how to manage digital initiatives more generally. It's usually because there was a big political scandal and somebody was on the line, was held to account and there was a clear point of ministerial ownership.
This is a challenge in the Canadian case in that we have muddied ownership of all these questions. Is that not right? There are, first of all, many departments involved, like Public Services and Procurement Canada, Treasury Board. Now we have the Minister of Citizens' Services, Shared Services. ESDC is an owner of many of these, so how do we...?
To move beyond just the specific question of what happened with ArriveCAN, when there is an IT failure it can be really hard to locate whom to blame, but also, who's then sitting around the cabinet table, feeling like, “I'm responsible for this and I own this”? We had a minister of digital services in the past. We no longer have that role. I'm not sure that was necessarily the answer to this problem, but one thing that I think will be important to think about in future machinery-of-government configurations is, how do we create a clear locus of responsibility and accountability that answers questions in question period and actually can access the information they need to be responsible?
Of course, the other challenge around ministerial accountability on this particular file is that their ownership is so distributed and the decisions are happening in so many different ways that it's really hard to know who would be reasonably blamed for these things.