Government Operations Committee on June 10th, 2022

[Sony Perron]

We were rolling out the Microsoft 365 suite before the pandemic. We accelerated it. This was as a result of the study of the various products that were available to create an enterprise licence and negotiations that happened.

There are a couple of products on the market that provide that suite of products. This happened a couple of years ago, when the selection was going on with the multi-year agreement with one vendor, which was Microsoft.

There are some places where some products are being used, like you mentioned in the House of Commons. The House of Commons is not a mandatory client of Shared Services Canada, so they were at liberty to choose a different product. However, for other departments that are mandatory clients of Shared Services Canada, everybody's using the enterprise solution that at the time was selected as being M365.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you.

Now we'll go to Ms. Thompson for five minutes.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for coming today with your team.

I'd like to begin with a question on supplementary estimates (A). This indicates that SSC will receive additional funding for core information technology services.

Minister, can you clarify what this entails? How does it impact either the services accessed directly by Canadians when interacting with the Government of Canada, or public servants in their work, providing program support and services to Canadians?

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Thank you, MP Thompson, for that question.

Federal budget 2021 proposed the following assessment of past funding levels and associated costs. The Department of Finance directed this access funding to support two items. These were the onboarding of 4% new or renewed government full-time equivalents, FTEs, to cover certain ongoing core IT service costs, and then for direct costs in support of two partner-led initiatives, providing standardized network services, software and hardware for workplace technology devices and technology-related services.

This funding ensures that the public servants have the tools they need to serve Canadians. Especially during the period where most public servants are working remotely, having the IT equipment and services they need makes it possible for them to continue offering the services on which Canadians depend, which I've mentioned previously, and processing the numerous requests that come in across government. It's really critical that those services and supports continue to be offered.

The majority of this funding supports the onboarding of new employees into the federal public service. It ensures that they have access to the IT services they require to do their work, including, for example, access to mobile devices, email and telecommunications services.

That's a breakdown in response to your question.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you.

Minister, like you, my team and constituents were deeply impacted by the broad impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and certainly that was in all aspects of life. I realize this was referenced earlier, but I'd like to be a little more specific in my question.

Government services and programs, existing and new, continued throughout the pandemic to serve Canadians. Public servants across the board were able to work remotely and to continue to be there to serve Canadians, and I want to absolutely recognize their invaluable contribution and the accomplishment of the SSC public servants in overcoming unprecedented technical challenges. It was really quite remarkable what was able to happen in a very short period of time.

This highlights that the modern workplace will be a hybrid workplace. I realize that was referenced earlier. This workplace will be one where IT capacity not only allows for but encourages a broader cross-section of Canadians to pursue careers in the public service without having to pull up stakes and move to Ottawa.

Minister, how will the investments and learnings of the pandemic contribute to the modernization of workspaces, services, programs and program delivery for the Government of Canada?

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Thanks, MP Thompson, for that and thanks for acknowledging the work of Shared Services Canada. I agree completely with your comments.

I think it's important to understand the magnitude. We've talked about the work that has been done, the pivot, where overnight we had to transform systems, make it so that the work could continue to be done. To give a sense of the magnitude or scale of this, prior to the pandemic, there was an average of 20,000 simultaneous remote connections, and that's daily. During the pandemic, we saw the daily average exceed 240,000 simultaneous remote connections during the first year. Based on the last six months, the average remote connections have now stabilized at around 230,000.

To enable virtual work, SSC moved very quickly and implemented major upgrades to the enterprise network, government-wide Internet and network security, and enabled the deployment across the enterprise of digital communication and collaboration platforms enabled by Microsoft 365. This was key to employees' ability to collaborate remotely in support of critical services to citizens. This platform further improved the Government of Canada's ability to support accessibility and official language needs.

Now SSC continues to make significant upgrades to networks and boardrooms, as I have mentioned, to enable employees to collaborate from work sites with their remote colleagues, as well as support the bandwidth-intensive video conferencing tools. This is going to support the return to work work site, which a number of people have asked about, and enable a hybrid workforce, as well as prepare the foundational infrastructure and platforms that will modernize program and service delivery to Canadians for the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Minister.

With that, we've come to the end of our hour. We greatly appreciate your being with us and answering questions and being so open to answer them where available. As indicated, if there are further responses that you would like to make and that need to be done in writing, you can submit them to the clerk and he will distribute them to all members.

I would like to thank you, Mr. Perron and Mr. Nadeau, for your remarks, as well.

Finally, Minister, thank you once again for being with us.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

This ends the public portion of the meeting. We will now be going to the in camera portion of the meeting. As you are aware, you will have to leave the Zoom site you're on right now and then come back in. The Zoom instructions were provided to all committee members in advance.

With that, I'm going to suspend the meeting temporarily.

[Proceedings continue in camera]