Government Operations Committee on Nov. 14th, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Good morning, everyone.

We'll get going. I understand that our MPs beaming in have had their mikes checked. Thanks very much.

Welcome to meeting number 38 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates or, as I call it, “the mighty OGGO”.

We have witnesses today from the Canada Border Services Agency, PSPC, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Public Safety Canada, and Shared Services Canada. I won't name all the witnesses because there are so many.

Because we have so many departments today, we will skip over, with agreement of the parties, the usual five-minute openings. Some have sent us their opening statements in writing. Thank you very much. If anyone else wishes to do so, you can do so after the fact.

I would like to give each of you just a two-minute opening brief, please. Again, this is because we have so many witnesses and only two hours.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

Really quickly—and this may not be a point of order—it is my understanding that when we invite witnesses to attend a committee meeting, they are invited to send us their opening remarks 72 hours before the meeting.

I would have really appreciated receiving all of the remarks the departmental officials are bringing. I do note that Ms. Casey was the only one who provided us with her comments ahead of time.

If we are now going to be given just a summary of what they may have wanted to present, perhaps we could ask all of them to provide their comments in writing to us after this meeting.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That's a good point. I did mention that, but perhaps in different words.

Perhaps the five departments would provide.... I see that Ms. O'Gorman has provided hers. However, if the other departments wish to provide their opening statements after the fact, it would be wonderful.

Apparently some have arrived late and will be distributed shortly.

It is a good note for our witnesses for this committee, or other ones, to provide the information in advance, especially for our translators but also with respect to our members of Parliament.

We'll start with the CBSA.

Would you provide us with a quick two-minute overview, please?

[Erin O'Gorman, President, Canada Border Services Agency]

Thank you.

I'm Erin O'Gorman. I'm the president of the Canada Border Services Agency. I believe you have my remarks.

I would just briefly flag that the need for the ArriveCAN app arose when it became impractical for the Public Health Agency to manage the manual paper-based process to pass the information necessary to provinces and territories, and to carry out enforcement and compliance activities. I think we will speak more about that today.

I would point out that the CBSA has published a breakdown of the expenditures related to ArriveCAN. Again, I think we can elaborate on that further.

I would just like to point out and address the error that was contained in the CBSA's response to order paper Q-597. ThinkOn was wrongly listed as a contractor; it should have been Microsoft. The error was a human one and resulted from a one-key mistake that led to the reporting discrepancy. I apologize to the committee for that mistake, confirm that our CFO has double-checked and is satisfied that there are no other errors contained in the order paper question response, and can attest to its accuracy.

I will end there, Mr. Chair.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you very much, Ms. O'Gorman.

Now we'll hear from PSPC, please.

[Michael Mills, Assistant Deputy Minister, Procurement Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and members.

Thank you for inviting us to speak today about how PSPC can support the Canada Border Services Agency and the Public Health Agency in meeting their needs.

I would draw attention to the fact that we, as a common service provider, are really trying to make available the most agile and effective instruments to serve the needs of our clients and help them deliver their departmental needs. In this case, we were able to leverage a number of standing offers and supply arrangements to help the CBSA augment its capacity and bring on timely service to meet the pressing needs of COVID-19.

As we look at our instruments and try to improve them, we're always looking at how to make sure that we're in a market capacity and that we're also able to provide the widest range of services, so we periodically refresh our standing offers and supply arrangements to ensure value. However, in the case of an emergency, we also have to balance that with risk. In some cases, we are required to look at sole-sourced contracts and other mechanisms to be able to move quickly, but we're always doing that within the optic of trying to balance effectiveness, cost and fairness, as well as managing risk. In this case, we think we were able to work with our departments and agencies to provide the services they needed and to balance those factors.

As we go forward, Mr. Chair, I just would like to say that we will continue to look at ways that we can be fair, open and transparent in our procurements and that we will try to provide the most responsive procurements possible to serve the needs of the departments.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Mr. Mills.

We'll go to PHAC, please, for two minutes.

[Jennifer Lutfallah, Vice-President, Health Security and Regional Operations Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada]

Good morning.

My name is Jennifer Lutfallah. I'm the vice-president of health security and regional operations at the Public Health Agency. I'll just underscore a few points that are contained in my speaking points, which I think you do have.

At the onset of the pandemic, monitoring health measures at the border was a paper-based process. It was a cumbersome one. It was a labour-intensive process. Further exasperating the process was the collection of forms using biohazard protocols. As you will remember, at that point in the pandemic there was suspicion that the virus could live on paper.

PHAC was responsible for collecting, organizing and shipping paper forms that were collected from travellers from all over the country and for digitizing and inputting that information into PHAC's systems. That could take up to about 14 days. We were faced with incomplete and illegible information that was contained on those forms.

In terms of the number of adjustments that were made with the OICs, there were over 80 different OICs written by PHAC as a means to respond to the evolving pandemic. Each time, in most of those circumstances, ArriveCAN needed to be adjusted to respond to those new public health requirements.

I'll finish by stating that without ArriveCAN, Canada's ability to administer the public health measures at the border would have been significantly reduced.

That's it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you.

Next is Shared Services, please.

[Kristina Casey, Assistant Deputy Minister, Citizen and Business Branch, Shared Services Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee, for your invitation today.

I'm Kristina Casey, the assistant deputy minister of the citizen and business branch at Shared Services Canada.

Shared Services provides core IT services to the Government of Canada's departments and agencies using an enterprise approach. Some of the services we offer include hosting services, including the provision of cloud services across the Government of Canada. We administer brokering services, technical expertise and tools to guide customer departments and simplify cloud adoption. SSC has established a list of pre-qualified cloud vendors that meet security requirements and that can be leveraged by departments, such as CBSA, to run their applications.

SSC's role in regard to the ArriveCAN app was to enable the cloud connectivity and monitoring and supporting infrastructure. It was about providing the foundational platform for an enterprise application to operate. Throughout the Public Health Agency of Canada and Canada Border Services Agency design, development and deployment process of the app, SSC supported the implementation of a number of networking changes to enable the application to securely exchange information between the cloud solution and the Government of Canada data centres. Specifically, this was done by securely housing the app in the cloud and routing network traffic through a secure infrastructure to protect the sensitive data of Canadians and visitors.

I'll leave my opening comments at that.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Great. Thank you very much.

It's my understanding that Public Safety Canada will not be providing an opening.

We'll go right to you, Mr. Barrett, for six minutes, please.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To the CBSA, on which date will you provide the outstanding documents that were ordered by this committee on October 17?

[Erin O'Gorman]

In terms of the outstanding information you refer to, I believe that's the invoices.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

It's the invoices and the list of subcontractors.

[Erin O'Gorman]

Right. We did provide a list of invoices. My apologies, but we are looking at about 500 invoices, and we're in the process of having those translated. We can work with the clerk to see whether you would like those provided at once or as we finish the translation.

In terms of subcontractors, we don't have that information. We just have information relating to those who held the contract directly with either CBSA or PSPC.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

So CBSA does not know who the subcontractors were who worked on the ArriveCAN app.

[Erin O'Gorman]

No. We have the relationship with the primary contractor. Again, that was mostly through PSPC, but we had some contracts directly ourselves.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Did ministers' staff, PCO, or any political exempt staff have any input with respect to the timeline for response to the document production request that was made by this committee?

[Erin O'Gorman]

No.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

There was a lot of public interest following the incident that you mentioned with respect to ThinkOn. It was said they received $1.2 million, but they said they did not receive it. That information was not provided in the House—the correction. The information that the minister signed off on stands in the House.

Following that.... We're a reasonable group of people. We gave a reasonable timeline for those documents and invoices to be tabled at this committee. It does raise questions when it's been 28 days since that happened.

The government and CBSA should know where the $54 million was spent on this app and who was paid. There are definitely questions on whether this delay is the result of simply not knowing, or whether there are more accounting errors. Has there been direction given in hopes that a scandal for the government goes away, or at worst there's a cover-up happening because there's uncomfortable information for ministers or government included in there?

Which of those scenarios best describes what we're dealing with in a 28-day delay in getting invoices? It should be pretty straightforward and they don't even require translation, because they can just be tabled mostly containing total amounts and the name of the subcontractor.

[Erin O'Gorman]

In terms of the error, again, I apologize for that. CBSA is accountable for that error. I understand that the revised OPQ will be tabled, if not today then certainly this week. It did come about by somebody contacting ThinkOn, because it hadn't been caught in our system. As I mentioned, the CFO has gone through all of the other information contained in the OPQ. It was a transmittal error.

ThinkOn did not receive a contract and was not paid for anything. It was an error in the coding. That's how that came up.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I remain a bit mystified as to why there's a delay on providing what should be very straightforward information. I think most people can keep track so that if money goes out, then a receipt of payment is generated. The list of people getting paid should be quite easy to produce. The committee did not suggest that the documents should come on October 31. There was a requirement that they be here.

Other departments, when they've had issues, have asked if they can extend until a date, or release the documents in tranches. At this point, it appears that there's an unwillingness to provide the information.

On what day can CBSA commit to providing the information that was due two weeks ago?

[Erin O'Gorman]

In terms of the Order Paper question, as I said, I believe that will be tabled. That information was also contained—the same information—in a response to the motion.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

That's not my question, with all due respect.

[Erin O'Gorman]

The list of invoices has been provided. It is my understanding that the list of invoices has been provided, but the actual translation of the 500 invoices will take time.