Evidence of meeting #37 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was fintrac.
A video is available from Parliament.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
Yes, absolutely.
Bloc
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Perfect; thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Thank you very much.
I want to follow up really quickly, Mr. Davis. You're talking about a list of different cloud and AI vendors and a bunch of different tools that are now available to departments. I'm wondering, can you submit to this committee a list of all the vendors for cloud, for AI and for the various tools that you have mentioned here today?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
There are some active procurements in that cloud space, but for the ones we have firm contracts with, absolutely, yes.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Thank you. I really appreciate that.
Building out from that separately, can you confirm that the cloud services you are offering are located solely in Canada?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
I'll respond, and please let me know whether this is exactly what you're asking.
The data that is being stored in the cloud provisioning that we procure on behalf of departments and for which they then leverage our contracts.... Those cloud capabilities are housed in Canada, yes.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Are they accessible only by Canadians? I'm just making sure they're very secure. That's what I'm after. We've heard from Shared Services previously about the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of cyber-attacks that happen daily on Canadian government services. I just really want to make sure that this is very secure and what your level of confidence is in that.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
Do you mean confidence in the 20 billion cyber-attacks we have per day or....
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
No. I'm sorry. Thankfully, very few of those have ever been successful. I mean that the security is not going to be easily accessible, I guess, for people trying to probe our system.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Chief Financial Officer, Shared Services Canada
I'm sorry for the humour.
Absolutely, yes, we are secure.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Mr. Hammond, I want to switch over to you for a bit here, because you're the CFO for PSPC. Is that correct? You're nodding yes.
How much money is allotted to the Defence Investment Agency? Do you know that number, roughly, off the top of your head?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
I can speak a bit to the amount that was allocated to the Defence Investment Agency for last year, when it was part of PSPC as a special operating agency. We allocated approximately $2.8 million related to the joint transition office funding, which PSPC had received previously, and that was specifically to look at the procurement rules around defence procurement and ways to create efficiencies there. That funding had been allocated to the DIA for last year.
We also internally allocated another $5 million to help support the Defence Investment Agency as it was ramping up. They now are looking at the ongoing resourcing requirements associated with that. There was some funding that was approved, as part of budget 2025, that will start this year. Those resources will be determined in terms of what that organization looks like on a longer-term basis.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Do you, as CFO, get to see what the requests are for the DIA?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
We have supported the DIA as they prepare their requirements for moving forward, yes.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
The reason I'm asking is that we heard previously that the Defence Investment Agency was not involved with the F-35, that it would be outside of it, but we just heard from the minister on April 20, through the media, that the Defence Investment Agency has actually been quite involved with the F-35 project. I'm curious to know, have you received any requests for funding for the Defence Investment Agency that would be related to the F-35?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
I have not seen any specific funding requests related to that.
The way the funding model works for defence procurement is that some of the funding related to those specific projects is provided by the Department of National Defence. I wouldn't necessarily have seen or been part of the conversations around the specific projects and the funding related to those. Those are conversations between the Defence Investment Agency and the Department of National Defence.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Building on some other things we have heard today, we know there have been lots of announcements about big money being put into defence. One article I read had it upwards of half a trillion dollars.
How fast and how readily is the Defence Investment Agency, through you, able to get that money and spend that money, and what controls do you have over that to make sure it is not misappropriated?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
The Defence Investment Agency—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Mr. Hammond, we're past our time. Can you make it a really short response?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
Absolutely, sir.
The Defence Investment Agency has been set up. They're in the process of transferring over the projects, and I think the framework around what they can deliver and the timing and associated pieces will be worked out over the coming months. However, those questions may be better directed at the CEO and the CFO for the Defence Investment Agency, who are responsible for the specific projects.
Conservative
Liberal
Jessica Fancy-Landry Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Awesome.
Thank you very much to everybody, through you, Chair, for coming today as witnesses. This has been really good testimony. I don't usually serve on this committee, so this was really opening my mind when I was preparing yesterday.
I'd like to ask either Mr. Hammond or Ms. Hanspal about what you mentioned earlier regarding standard setting. I want to see how we can keep our standards by also creating efficiencies. That's the theme of my line of questioning today. My first question is, why wasn't the authority for standard setting and that custodianship assigned to a specific standard development within the organization?
Chief Financial Officer, Department of Public Works and Government Services
We did have an organization within PSPC that was looking after specific standards in certain areas, and there are, I think, about 70 standards that that group was managing. They are going through the process of identifying the specific owners of those standards and liaising with those groups in order to determine where the best standard-setting body would be to take over responsibility for them.