Evidence of meeting #133 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was software.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
That's a lot clearer. As I understand it, if the government has done an assessment of that kind, we want to see it. I thought it would be included in all the documents, but I always welcome clarification.
Conservative
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
I fundamentally disagree with Mr. McKinnon that this is not an expense. His words were that this $9 million is “not an expense” and that $9 million in a cost-of-living crisis and in a housing crisis in our country—$9 million on a condo for Justin Trudeau's buddy Tom Clark on Billionaires' Row—is not an expense. Was it a gift? How did that purchase come to pass?
It's just absolute fantasy along the lines of budgets balancing themselves. Of course $9 million is an expense, and it was taken out of Canadians' pockets. It was taxed off of their paycheques. Of course $9 million is an expense.
I'm pleased that the chair did heavily coach the amendment, because in its current form it's supportable, though it wasn't in its original form. However, we want all of the information about this $9-million expense that taxpayers are footing for the luxury condo for Justin Trudeau's buddy Tom Clark living on quote Billionaires' Row in New York City. I hope Mr. Clark enjoys it until the day after the next election.
Conservative
Larry Brock Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON
I'm sure we've all dabbled in real estate in our personal lives, if not professional lives, but my concern is that and there's always a cost attached to any assessment of fair market value.
Conservative
Larry Brock Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON
I understand that, Chair. I just want to complete my thoughts.
There's always a cost to obtain an assessment. In the ordinary course of events, the Liberal government, or an agent of the Liberal government, would have negotiated the purchase of this extravagant, ultra-luxury penthouse on Billionaires' Row for $9 million. There may or may not have been an assessment that was made privy to the agent who purchased the property on behalf of the Government of Canada, but unless it's in the government's possession, even if one exists, and unless the author of that assessment is a very generous individual or company, they are highly unlikely to release it to the government to comply with this order without a cost. The Liberal Party of Canada is in a position to pony up for a potential expenditure to comply with this particular order of committee, and my concern is it should not fall to the taxpayer.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Yes, I just wanted to quibble about Mr. Barrett's comments. It's a purchase of a liquid asset. It is owned by the Government of Canada. It can be sold at some point and presumably at the value we captured. It is definitely not an expense by any acceptable accounting process.
I'll leave it at that. I also would suggest that we should allow our witnesses to leave if they don't want to stay.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Maybe save that for your committee, Mr. McKinnon.
I'm sensing we're getting close, so I'm hoping we might be able to get one more round in with the witnesses, because I want to hear more from them.
Do we need to vote on Mr. McKinnon's subamendment? It sounds like we're in general agreement with basically providing those documents if they exist, as the clerk has read back. Are we fine with that? Do we need to vote on it, or can we accept it as is? I'm sensing we are accepting it by unanimous consent.
(Subamendment agreed to)
We are now back to the original, now-amended motion, and thus to the amendment first. Are we fine with it?
(Amendment as amended agreed to)
Wonderful.
We're back now to the amended motion. Are we fine with it, colleagues?
(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
Wonderful.
I am glad we did not dismiss our witnesses. We are going back to our speaking order. I'm sincere about that, because I'm finding the time with Mr. Boots and Ms. Clarke fascinating, so I'm very happy that we can have them for a bit longer.
Mr. McKinnon, you are up now for five minutes with Professor Clarke and Mr. Boots. Go ahead, sir.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Well, it turns out I'm glad we didn't release them as well.
Dr. Clarke, you mentioned a number of countries that have this problem nailed. I wonder whether you can give us the top three, in order of how they would be most useful for Canada to model.
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
I don't know whether I can rank the top three just off the top, but when I look at countries that are generally succeeding in the quality of their digital services and modernization, vendor management and IT contracting are a big part of their strategy because, clearly, the answer here is not for everything to be built in-house. There's a lot of room, and there has to be room to have healthy relationships with these outside providers.
I mentioned a few examples of countries that are doing interesting work in this space. I'll offer up a few that come to mind. I know that, in Singapore, in speaking with a public servant there who works on their digital government initiatives, they have a practice of making sure that, whenever they work with a larger vendor that may not be a local firm, they have clauses in the contract that say that they have to bring along local firms to give them the opportunity to work on a government project, to help infuse more local economic development and to foster a really strong local tech ecosystem.
On the point of bringing in strong tech talent, we talked a fair bit already about the issue of salary disparities. Countries that are succeeding at bringing in that kind of talent to senior roles are taking some of the measures that Mr. Boots mentioned, like not strictly forcing these people into managerial roles when that's not where their passion and talent lie, but also really emphasizing the public mission of government. This is something that comes up constantly in interviews with technologists who choose careers in government despite the lower pay: It's really rewarding and meaningful to actually improve your country and help people get services that work. Pushing that message is really powerful and works very well, as examples, in the United States and in the United Kingdom, for bringing in technologists.
We talked a bit about the problems of revolving doors and sashaying from a career in government into these firms, and how that creates opportunities for, perhaps, inappropriate contracting. I also think we want to nuance that by noting that we still want to encourage a fluid interchange between the private sector and government, to acknowledge that it may not be realistic for those who have lucrative opportunities in the private sector to work an entire career in government, to make it easier to have more of those interchanges and to build up a really strong culture of seeing those outside players as not strictly the enemy while having strong rules and good organizational hygiene internally so that, when you do have that back and forth, you don't worry as much and don't need to be as concerned about conflict of interest or cronyism.
This came up, for example, when I spoke with public servants in Estonia, a globally recognized digital leader. They see the boundary between public and private as pretty fluid, and that's partially because they are a tiny nation and it's a small community. I asked them, “Aren't you worried about those folks leaving government and then using that to build the profit of a firm?” They said, “We all know each other. We have a high level of trust. We have strong rules in place and a very strong culture of good governance.”
These are some of the things we want to focus on building in Canada. I think there are tons more. I think that the spending controls, which I mentioned, are needed in this case just as a hard stop on bad practices. That's another one....
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Singapore is a small island. Estonia is very small. It seems to me that dealing with problems there is quite different from a large country like Canada, with our vast geographical areas, communication issues and so on and so forth. Do you really think that those countries provide a solid model for us to follow?
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
Mr. Boots, go for it.
Former Federal Public Servant, As an Individual
In relation to the question of who owns the software that's being built through government IT contracts, around intellectual property and the use of open-source software, there are some other really interesting examples of different countries doing really interesting things. A couple of examples of this that may be a bit more comparable to the Canadian geographic context are both Germany and France.
The Government of France, maybe a decade ago, declared in legislation that essentially all technology products bought and used by the federal government or by the national government in France needed to be open-source. The term “open-source”, I think, often makes you think of geeks writing code in the basement of a university, but open-source software is widely used by the private sector tech industry, governments, universities and organizations all around the world. It helps get around the situation in which you bought a product from a commercial software vendor that only they provide, and then you're just stuck with them for decades, which often happens with government technology products: We spend millions of dollars on a product from one vendor, and getting away from them is too difficult because they're too entrenched. That's a systemic problem that shows up a lot, so France has legislation that says, “When we're paying companies to build software for us, it needs to be reusable and licensed under an agreement that lets other departments, other parts of the government or even other countries use it.” That's really important.
Germany recently launched what it calls the sovereign technology fund, which is essentially government funding to build digital software products that can be reused across the German government and other governments around the world so that they're not paying for the same software over and over again. There's this idea that, just as bridges, airports and ports create an infrastructure on which the economy functions, government-owned or open-source government-used software creates an infrastructure layer that lets services be delivered more efficiently, at a lower cost and more reliably.
There's a lot of interesting work happening to make software reusable. I think that, for Canada, you could imagine a future government introducing something like a “Don't Pay for the Same Software Twice Act” that enshrines this idea that if we're paying for some company to build a brand new piece of software—
Conservative
Former Federal Public Servant, As an Individual
That is not a problem. It's a topic I'm a bit too passionate about, so I appreciate the question a lot.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
When we bring the two of you back, if you'll come back after you produce your paper, I think we'll do an extended meeting just so we can have some more time for this.
We're going to do our final set of interventions.
I have Mr. Barrett for five minutes, please.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Ms. Clarke, before we left off I asked you about ministerial accountability because we saw situations like the Trudeau Liberals' arrive scam, companies like GC Strategies—a two-person operation working out of a basement—adding no value. Supposedly, they were to source resources to work on the project, but we learned from KPMG, which is a huge company, that KPMG was instructed by the public service that they would need to be a subcontractor of GC Strategies, adding 30% to the cost of it—and there were many of these cases.
Is the problem that no one is in charge anymore, so there's no one actually trying to evaluate whether we're getting value from these contractors, big or small? As you said, though the larger companies are the most successful at winning the bids, they're not necessarily providing the best value for money.
Value for money is a whole other conversation that we'll save for another day because there are far too many cases in which, as the Auditor General noted, we don't get value for money with the Trudeau Liberals' procurement process.
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
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.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Right, and they shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic so often that it's hard to know whose seat is whose. They had four PSPC ministers in four years, so it's really tough. They created a situation intentionally to make it harder to hold individual ministers to account. This Prime Minister established a system in which no one is held responsible in spite of their failures. He doesn't fire the ministers when they break ethics laws and fail Canadians.
You know, there's a list of two-person middlemen companies like GC Strategies, and it seems there are dozens of them. Solutions Moerae Inc. had two employees and got $78 million in contracts; Messa Computing has one employee, got $34 million; Mobile Resources Group has one employee, got $28 million; Access Corporate Technologies has two employees, got $9 million; Hackett Consulting has one employee, got $8 million. They must have really worked overtime. What real value did they provide to Canadians for these hundreds of millions of dollars? Isn't it easy to say that they provided no value?
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
I don't know what each of those firms did. I didn't look at the individual contracts or what their deliverables were, so I really can't comment on the value for money. However, I will say, in looking at the patterns we saw in the data, that we have very good reason to believe that the pooling of contracts in a small number of firms and also the general practices around how we manage IT procurement suggest that there would not be value for many of the IT contracts that we're striking, just even at the basic level of how much money is going into each of those individual contracts.
Conservative
Liberal
