Government Operations Committee on Dec. 8th, 2022

[Alistair Croll]

Yes, I've been following the news. I think it is not my place to decide what is an acceptable cost to the public in a matter of public health. I think that's better placed for ethicists and philosophers.

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

I think you called into question what was considered a mass wrongdoing, so my question to you is this: Would you consider that a mass wrongdoing as the result of an app that failed?

[Alistair Croll]

I don't think that I can speak to anything other than the cost of software development and the efficacy of that. I don't have any insight into the operation of the application that was delivered by the people using it or the technology used to scan and verify any documentation that may have happened.

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

Okay.

[Alistair Croll]

I'm speaking strictly to the software development side of things.

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

Well, I will move on with another question for you.

In your opening statement, you said that in 12 years we've fallen from third to 32nd in the UN's assessment of digital government. We're obviously going in the wrong direction in regard to what you would say needs to happen with government becoming a digital government.

I agree with you, especially when I think about what we heard in earlier testimony in regard to the procurement of the ArriveCAN app, knowing that there were three companies identified as the companies that could potentially do this. Then I was surprised to hear that a company like GC Strategies, which subcontracts all the work for an application, took a cut of somewhere between 15% to 30%, and we cannot get any information on the subcontracting. That is deeply concerning to me, because governments need to be transparent and accountable when it comes to the expenditures of Canadians' money.

I guess I would also say that this undoubtedly increases the price of the contracts to government. Not only do we not have access to who these contractors are, but now we also know it's costing more.

I'm wondering if you believe the government can create an effective in-house capability or, at the very least, if they should be contracting with IT firms that can do the work themselves in order to save the taxpayers' money.

[Alistair Croll]

I couldn't agree with you more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

It will have to be a brief answer, as well.

[Alistair Croll]

Yes, we are paying a markup, because it's in a public health crisis at a time when tech developers are in high demand. The private sector is compensated ridiculously more than the public sector for technological developers.

I would refer you to what Amanda Clarke, Sean Boots and Catherine Luelo said on the subject. Canada's paying a premium, and we are mortgaging our ability to define our own future by relying on outsourced contracting marked up by third party procurers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Great.

Mr. Bains, you have five minutes, please.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for joining us today. I'm going to start with Mr. Croll.

My colleague earlier referenced an article you published. You commented that these development shops are building an app in idealized conditions. Can you expand on that, please?

[Alistair Croll]

It was Thanksgiving weekend. They all decided to stick around for the weekend and do it. I don't think people were in a similar situation in March or April 2020.

This shop already has access in both cases to version control software, existing cloud-hosting accounts, tools for integrated development environments, tools like Slack, or whatever else. They're already set up to do this stuff. They probably have Figma for user interface design.

Once you have a pipeline like that, you don't have to recreate it from scratch for a new project. When you're cobbling together dozens of subcontractors across firms, often through third party intermediaries, the overhead of managing and maintaining that process versus what we have within Canada in the Canadian Digital Service and other places, you're already paying a markup just to get the system to work.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

You just referenced the Canadian Digital Service. In that same article, you mentioned that the government should have an app development shop. Now you're referencing the Canadian Digital Service. How would your proposed app development shop differ from the Canadian Digital Service?

[Alistair Croll]

The CDS is our best attempt to do that at the moment.

The way I would explain it is like Lego. If you're trying to build something out of Lego, you have component pieces that you can put together to build a house fairly quickly. Our government already has applications like GC Notify, which is a tool that will send out notifications very simply. In fact, at FWD50 this year, they built a notification system in an hour.

We have another one for forms. If you have a form you want to fill out, you use the form tool that we've built. It's automatically accessible, translated and easy to use. It complies with all laws. We have another one for sending out, for example, translation and so on. You build these building blocks, and once you have that foundation, you can very quickly create new pieces of technology on top of it.

For example, we had a speaker from Ukraine. She's the Ukrainian liaison to the European Union for their digital government. Ukraine has leapt forward in the digital government rankings, despite the fact that they're at war. They have a technology that allows every citizen to be identified by looking at their phone. We don't have a unified digital identity. As you can imagine, being able to log into a system is the first requirement for being able to use it properly. However, in Ukraine, that same tool was quickly repurposed to report war crimes or to report attacks.

Once you have these building blocks, you can build new things on top of them, but we are not investing in consistent, reusable building blocks. The Westminster model encourages each department to build its own things in its little fiefdom, rather than defining what is a common feature, like a notification or a form, and saying, “This is what we're going to use, and everyone is going to use it”, making it awesome and then letting people quickly build things on top of it as experiments, and when those experiments don't work, taking them back, rather than facing criticism.

Taiwan has a parallel digital government portal. On every page that you go to on Taiwan's website, you can replace “GOV” with “G0V” and see their beta of the current website. You can go and try it, and if it works, they'll make it mainstream. That's a very big difference from our approach.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I may have time for one more here.

We heard from the gentleman who was involved in the hackathon. In the future, do you believe that the hackathons can add value—as opposed to being an opportunity to advertise and market software developers—in helping the government develop apps and have these folks and these hackathons help improve whatever we're working on?

[Alistair Croll]

Rapid prototyping in the form of hackathons is great, but it's not a substitute for a finished product. It can often mislead you. Just because you can do something in a week doesn't mean that this thing is going to be the final product.

I would love to see groups within government doing hackathons on projects when it isn't a crisis. Let's decide what we need to build, as a country, and let's build it without it being a time of crisis. Let's set aside money for that kind of investment so that the product is there when we need it.

I think in the private sector, hackathons do a very good job of showing that small, nimble shops can often outpace large, well-heeled organizations that are great at filling RFPs. We need to diversify the suppliers of government technology, ideally not to involve third parties—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I have to cut you off there, Mr. Bains.

Ms. Vignola, you have two and a half minutes.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Croll, what you're saying is very interesting.

I think my question is simple. In recent years, the Canadian government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in technological and other upgrades. Despite this, the country now ranks 32nd out of 193, down from third.

What accounts for such a decline, despite the investments? How could that have affected the cost and deployment of ArriveCAN, if at all?

[Alistair Croll]

I'll do my best to answer in French.

First of all, I would say that it's because of the advancement of other countries in relation to Canada. Many other countries have made progress, such as England and Ukraine, for example. The notes I provided contain a lot of information on the subject. There are also some rather surprising research results.

There are also problems in Canada related to provincial jurisdictions. Since most identification is done through the health insurance plan or driver's licences, it's difficult to have a single federal identification system. It's incredible.

We trust Google, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to log in, but that's not possible with our country. In fact, the government is the only one that owes us something and that has a legal process. I can't talk to Mark Zuckerberg and tell him that he gave me login information and that he shouldn't have done that.

We really need to come to the conclusion that the world is in the digital age and our country is in the digital age. Our services have to be digital first. That doesn't mean we're going to leave behind people who don't embrace the digital environment, but digital systems are more efficient. More research can be done on a digital platform. The login information is there, and it's easier to go and see what happened in a session than in a conversation between two humans.

I think there are a lot of reasons to invest in this, but some government employees don't want their department to be forced to keep up with the technology and expense associated with a common application.

It's time for Canada to speed up the process and resume its place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm afraid I have to cut you off there, Mr. Croll.

We'll go to Mr. Johns for two and a half minutes and then we'll finish up.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

My mom was a public servant, and I saw first-hand the sacrifice and how much she cared about her fellow countrymen. It was just amazing.

The Prime Minister made a statement on June 12, 2022, during National Public Service Week. He said, “the government is taking steps to foster a more inclusive public service”. Thinking and hearing about all this, I would feel it's not a safe or inclusive workplace when you're in fear and when there's nowhere to turn.

Mr. Hutton, perhaps you can speak about what kind of workplace this is, given these results, when there's nowhere to go. Over 50% of the public service workers who are off work are there because of mental health issues. Do you believe that this is contributing to it?

[David Hutton]

I think there are a lot of factors here.

We know from research that whistle-blowing doesn't take place in some organizations because there's such an open environment and competent management. When wrongdoing is reported to your boss, it just gets dealt with and there are no repercussions. It's not even called whistle-blowing.

In an environment that's very hierarchical, where there's a fear to report any bad news upwards and there's a significant amount of harassment existing as a problem, then whistle-blowing mechanisms are required. They are not going to fix this, but they will help to avoid some of the harm because whistle-blowing can act as an early warning and prevent major problems from spiralling out of control.

There's no reason in the world that Phoenix should have lasted beyond the first year of its operation, yet it went on for years and was ultimately released. It's mind-boggling.

On the larger picture of the atmosphere in the public service, I have opinions, but I don't have direct experience, so I'll pass—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I just want to add that there's the human cost and there's the cost of the economic leakage of the disasters. There are also the mental health claims that the government is incurring. This is significant. When you work in an unsafe workplace and you end up off work with mental health issues, you need help. The government is also failing there.

I want to thank you so much for your very important contributions.

[David Hutton]

I'd also like to mention that many whistle-blowers suffer from PTSD because of what they've gone through in terms of reprisals and so on. It's a big mental health issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks, Mr. Johns.

Mr. Croll and Mr. Hutton, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it, as always.

Unless anyone has anything else, we can run to vote.

The meeting is adjourned.