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.
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Thank you. My apologies for that. I didn't want to jump in front of Mr. Boots.
I will undertake to get you an answer on that. Thank you very much for your question.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Okay.
In the case of ArriveCAN, this committee has been told that work on the app was outsourced because of the urgent need and lack of internal capacity. The mandate letter of the President of the Treasury Board includes developing a public service skills strategy with an emphasis on “increasing the number of public servants with modern digital skills”. I think Ms. Clarke alluded to that as well. It also includes reducing “the time it takes to hire public servants.”
Can you speak to what progress has been made on those fronts over the last year? Will the strategy include anything to ensure digital expertise in senior leadership?
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Yes. Thank you.
Let me start with the last part of that question. In terms of increasing the skill set of senior leadership, that is an ongoing process. In fact, last week I spent time with the deputy minister community actually walking them through the digital ambition and talking to them about the types of things they should be working on with their teams, from policy design right through to operations. That is a common occurrence that is starting to happen in government. We have a number of different programs through the Canada School of Public Service, which I can't comment on, but certainly that is intended to do that type of training.
That's to the last question.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Ms. Clarke talked about the pay scale. GC Strategies is making between $1.2 million and $2.7 million. It's an obscene amount of money.
In 2018, the Auditor General recommended mandatory training for procurement officers on complex IT projects and agile methods. Has any effort been made to implement that recommendation? What have been your efforts, to follow up on what Ms. Clarke said, to ensure that we're recruiting people who understand and have the capacity and ability to do this kind of work?
Conservative
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
We have the recruitment office that we've stood up. In terms of the overall contract versus employee wage, I would offer up that this is a normal, consistent private sector-public sector gap across Canada. It specifically can be explained through the differential in things like pensions and benefit programs, etc. It's not a one-to-one ratio.
We can certainly revert with some additional information.
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for joining us today.
My first questions will be for you, Mr. Stewart. I'm wondering if, in your role as the deputy minister for public safety, you could advise us on who the minister's lead exempt staff were on this file.
Deputy Minister, International Trade, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
I can only name one. That would be the chief of staff, Zita Astravas.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
In your former role as well, can you perhaps advise us on how often the minister and that lead were briefed on the ArriveCAN app and the project itself?
Deputy Minister, International Trade, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
The briefing I can't recall in specific detail, but I can tell you that in that period of time of March 2020 through April, the briefings of the minister were almost daily.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
Thank you.
Are you aware of any other ministerial staff who were involved in any of the decisions on ArriveCAN?
Deputy Minister, International Trade, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Ministerial communications staff would have been involved in the soft launch and the formal launch.
Conservative
Deputy Minister, International Trade, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Not first-hand, but it would make sense for PCO and PMO to be informed of the intention to launch the app. Indeed, there was a community of deputy ministers and officials at all levels who were working together very intensively over that period of time: the Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, Immigration, Transport, Global Affairs. All these people had an interest in the pandemic and what we were doing to manage it. They were meeting regularly and would have been informed of the intention to move from a paper-based process to an electronic process.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
Thank you.
I'm now going to go to Ms. Clarke for a couple of questions. I'll put some context around the question.
We are all aware that GC Strategies was chosen for a large part of the work on ArriveCAN. They testified that they were not tech experts or developers. What they did was build teams with the expertise to do this work. We know from them and from the government that they cannot reveal the identities of the subcontractors because of confidentiality provisions in federal procurement rules. It is somewhat astounding to me that we can have government contracts awarded to companies that then subcontract, and there's no way we can know who those subcontractors are, the work they did and how much they were paid.
You recommended increased transparency around federal contracting: that departments “should disclose IT and professional services contract costs (also per-vendor) associated with each IT project on an annual basis.”
Can you comment on the practice of procuring the services of a vendor who does not do the actual work, but then procures the services of subcontractors? We can have no information when it comes time to ensuring that Canadians are getting value for the money that is being spent.
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
I don't know how widespread that is but, anecdotally, the idea that you would lean on a staffing agency to quickly pull together a team is not bizarre.
One of the things I've learned from the research and speaking with public servants, both in Canada and internationally, specifically about this question of how governments can responsibly work with private IT vendors is that once you have that core expertise in-house, you're in a great position to be that smart shopper, to compile those teams yourself and know which firms have expertise, who does good work, how to check their work and hold them to account. You can then directly build that search capacity—which is a term that often gets used by public servants—acknowledging that, especially when something needs to be done really quickly or there's an emergency, as was the case here, of course you're going to work with private vendors.
I don't tend to hear anybody telling me that working with an intermediary like a staffing agency is what they would view as best practice. That's all I will say about that.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you, Mrs. Block.
Next we'll have Mr. Jowhari for five minutes, please.
November 17th, 2022 / 4:20 p.m.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank the witnesses for coming in, in person, as well as for sharing their insight with us.
I look at the panel in front of us today and I see representatives from the government who are experts in digital polices, as well as security. I see researchers and academics who have done extensive research not only on our policy, but on how we could do better.
The CBSA representative, during that period, talked about the processing time and the scope of the work that was done.
In our last meeting, we managed to clearly establish, first of all, that in no way have we spent $54 million. The spend to date is about $40 million. In no way have we spent $54 million in developing this application. The total cost of the application development was around $8.8 million.
Today, I want to ask you this, as panellists with three different types of expertise. If I had come to you—and I consider myself a third party developer, and over a weekend developed an app—and I said that I am about to offer this application to you, which cost me, supposedly, about $250,000, what concerns would you have? Could such an application be developed with the extensive knowledge that you have and with the extensive discussions that you had during that time for that money?
I'm going to start with Ms. Luelo.
Deputy Minister, Chief Information Officer of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
It is a common practice to do weekend hackathons, when companies or individuals will build something that is a front-end application. Again, it's a common practice and one that we should aspire to work with these smaller start-up organizations on to continue to learn from some of the practices. I accept that.
What I would worry about, as an individual who has run wide-scale commercial operations, not just from the policy side, but actually running these things.... You worry about privacy; you worry about accessibility; you worry about it being multilingual; and you worry about how it hooks into all of the back-end systems. There's a whole testing protocol that needs to go on, not just to have you say it's okay, but to prove it's okay.
It's not just about taking the front end and connecting it to a very complex back-end environment that we have in the Government of Canada. It's taking the time to run the test to prove that you've met all of those criteria around accessibility, languages, security and privacy.
Those are the things that I would worry about.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Ms. Clarke and Mr. Boots combined could probably answer that question.
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, As an Individual
I agree completely.
People are pretty much over their enthusiasm for weekend hackathons. It's not the thing when it comes to building robust, accessible public services. That's not to say that we don't want to tap into a specific tech community, create open APIs and think about releasing data and collaborating with these players. You can't build strong public services on a shoestring, and it's not the kind of thing that can be designed, developed, and maintained by somebody hanging out in their basement for a weekend.