Government Operations Committee on March 4th, 2022

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Someone has to be driving this discussion to renegotiate or go back to a competitive bid, after six years of looking at the process. Where is that coming from? It doesn't come out of the blue. Someone is driving that.

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, I would just give assurances that we have a rigorous process with teams from the three departments looking at the scoring, based on a very detailed and complex RFP, and that process is, as I mentioned, very close to landing on the next steps.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That's not very reassuring. I'm not blaming you personally, but it's not very reassuring—seeing what's going on in Ukraine and the threats from Russia—that we could be potentially delaying this another year on top of several more months before a decision is made.

On the rapid tests, walk me through the arrival, please. You said $330 million has been spent so far. How many rapid tests is that? There are Bill C-8 and Bill C-10, and there is $4 billion more in the supplementary estimates (C). Walk me through the arrival time and the numbers, and what that $4 billion covers.

[Paul Thompson]

The number of rapid tests that have been purchased is 530 million. The number of rapid tests that have been received and shipped is 264 million. There was a particularly intense period of procurement in the last couple of months—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I realize that, but could you walk me through the arrivals? The government has asked for $4 billion for rapid tests. When will those four billion dollars' worth of tests be arriving? I know it's not one lump sum. Is it 20 million this month, 50 million next month? PSPC, I assume, has an idea.

[Paul Thompson]

We actually have posted online a schedule of all the deliveries to date, and I could certainly refer the member to that online posting. That's a tracking of the rapid tests received and delivered to provinces and territories, as well as the projected procurements that remain.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

In regard to the Auditor General's report on shipbuilding, on the CSC, what recommendations has PSPC acted on to speed up the process of our shipbuilding debacle, for lack of a better word?

[Paul Thompson]

On that—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

In the AG report, it was logged that PSPC accepted the recommendations. What have we acted on?

[Paul Thompson]

We continue to strengthen the governance process, and the key step in the CSC project at this point is landing on the final design process. Again, through the same governance that I mentioned, there is a process under way to land on those design requirements over the course of this year. That is targeted for fall of 2022 for this next phase—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Could you provide in writing to the committee the response as to which of the AG recommendations you've actually started on?

[Paul Thompson]

I'd be happy to do that.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Perfect, thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you very much, Mr. McCauley.

We'll now go to Mr. Jowhari, for six minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming today. I'm hoping for a speedy recovery for the minister so she could join us next.

I'm going to be focusing on e-procurements, so I'm not sure whether it would be Mr. Perron or Mr. Thompson. Okay, great, it's Mr. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson, in supplementary estimates (C), the department allocated about $21.6 million to continue to support the e-procurement solution project. Could you talk about the purpose of this funding? By way of background, could you talk about what the e-procurement project is all about, and how it is facilitating the use and inclusivity of the federal procurement process?

This is something that is within the mandate of the minister. I am really interested, if you could explore that angle for me.

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, thank you for the question on e-procurement. This is a project we're quite excited about. We have a very large procurement footprint across the government. This is a rebuild of the fundamental platform underpinning a system that supports $22 billion in government procurement.

This is a cloud-based approach. It's much more user-friendly, simpler and more accessible for small businesses, including equity-seeking businesses. It will reduce the burden associated with procurement transactions, and it will provide improved data from a better management system in terms of being able to look at the entire breadth of procurement in the government.

We have a phased rollout over the coming months, and through the ongoing engagement with user groups we're really hopeful that it will be a game-changer for businesses trying to do business with the Government of Canada.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

You mentioned some of the key functionalities. The one that piqued my interest was about data. As you know, we've been looking for disaggregated data from various aspects, for various reasons. Can you tell me how that's going to help us be able to get access to that type of data, and what is the timing? How much data do we need to collect before we are able to put those types of metrics out?

[Paul Thompson]

Data collection is a fundamental part of the agenda on e-procurement and part of our supplier diversity action plan as well.

A lot of the groups we're working with are helping us with definitions. There are different perspectives on what kinds of definitions should be used in terms of the different equity-seeking business organizations, but we are working with them. For example, “owned” and “operated” are two different definitional concepts. We are working with stakeholder groups to land on those definitions so we can better track our progress on supplier diversity.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Hopefully, we'll be in a position to at least get some sort of better picture.

I'll turn my focus to the next topic that I'm very interested in: return to work. As you know, the provinces, especially the Province of Ontario, are relaxing a lot of measures. People are getting back to work. I have a lot of constituents calling and welcoming that news, as well as some who are calling and saying that, for whatever reason, they chose not to get vaccinated and they want to get back to work and get back to some normality.

Let's talk about what we are doing from our end. Can you give us an update on the return to work that you have planned for the department? As you know, the department is in a fortunate position of enjoying a large number of public servants. Can you give us some idea about the return-to-work plan and what changes you are planning to put in place to ensure that everybody can come back to work?

[Paul Thompson]

Mr. Chair, this is a very topical issue for us. It's on the minds of all our employees right now, particularly as public health measures are relaxed.

Over the course of the pandemic, we were very fortunate to be able to work remotely quite effectively and productively, including with support from our colleagues at Shared Services Canada to make sure we had the remote capability. It has made us a very productive organization, as demonstrated by the departmental results report.

Going forward, we recognize that work has changed permanently. We will be looking at hybrid work options. There's a lot of thinking still to be done on exactly what that means. We're working with staff to try to find some models that ensure we're able to deliver on our mandate while also meeting some of the employee preferences.

It's undeniable that there will be an element of hybrid work that will be more prominent in the future than it has been in the past.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

Aside from the element of hybrid work, there is also an underlying technology support that's needed. I know on the immigration side for a while we had to switch to online processing of some of those applications.

Do you see any need or any gap in the area that the department is working on?

Probably that's a good way to go to Mr. Perron.

[Sony Perron]

Thank you for the question.

In fact, we started back in June of last year to engage with all our client departments to see what their plans and needs are. Right now, we have all learned how to work virtually and we are highly dependent on, in this case, Zoom, but in most of our offices, Teams, which consumes a lot of bandwidth. Therefore, we need to be prepared to accommodate the same level of consumption when employees get back in the office.

The system was built at the beginning of the pandemic to allow people to work from home, but now we need to organize our office to allow the same level of velocity, because if we think about hybrid work, there will still be people at home. There will also be teams that are very distributed. This has changed a lot in the last two years. I have teams that are distributed across the country, and they work together. Even if we have people in the office, they will use these virtual tools to connect.

Therefore, we have engaged since June of last year on bandwidth capacity. We have 4,000 buildings across the country that we need to look at. A certain number need upgrades. We have started the upgrade of the core infrastructure to allow that. We probably have a number of months still to go in order to do that, but we are progressing really well. We are also equipping the boardrooms of these departments so they can use this technology together without going to the—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I appreciate that. I'm going to come back to you in my next round.

Mr. Chair, thank you for your indulgence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Perron.

Thank you, Mr. Jowhari.

We'll now go to Mrs. Vignola for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question is basically about services in French and the translation of contracts.

The Commissioner of Official Languages has mentioned in the past that francophones have difficulty getting well translated contracts, or even contracts in French at all. The difficulty continues.

What specific measures have been put in place to ensure that francophones will no longer be discriminated against, and that they too will be included in the new solutions proposed for minorities?