Evidence of meeting #39 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 digital.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Would you say this is like the $80,000 it took to develop the initial version, the prototype of the app?
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
That's correct.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Let me know if you think this is right. I compare this to spending two years developing the best race car in the world. I've spent two years, made 70 modifications to the engine and all the different parts of the car, and tested it to make sure it met the highest safety standards. I tested it with multiple drivers on every different surface, in order to make sure it could be used easily, everywhere in the world. Then, somebody comes and copies the chassis of the car, based on the plans I developed. They say they did the same thing I did, even though nobody ever drove the chassis of that car.
Would that be a fair comparison?
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I think the comparison might be that they copied the paint colour.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
That helps me a lot.
Ms. Clarke, could you also chime in on that, in terms of that claim?
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
There were cute stories about people who created the app for $250,000 over a weekend, but, as we've discussed, that's not a fully functioning service. It's not being maintained; it doesn't have security protocols; it's not necessarily accessible; it's not looped into back-end systems, all the updates and orders in council that required changes.
What's more interesting to think about is this. We have an external capacity of civically minded tech folks in Canada who want to feed into the work of government. We've already talked about using more open source. If we did that, we would see a more interesting thing—not people creating apps over the weekend to get a little story in the National Post, but, instead, people looking at the code. They could scrutinize it, and they could look for security issues and find ways to improve it. That's a really beautiful collaboration that actually produces public value.
Liberal
Liberal
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thanks, Mr. Housefather.
Witnesses, thanks for joining us. You are excused.
The public portion of the meeting is now complete. We're going to proceed to the in camera portion of the meeting.
When we suspend the meeting, the tech staff will end this meeting on Zoom. Mr. Johns, Mr. Bains and Mr. Chambers, you'll have to log back in with the second part of the Zoom code.
With that, we are suspended.
[Proceedings continue in camera]