Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
The Government of Canada's legacy systems that support the delivery of our key income support programs are among the oldest IT systems in Canada still in use today. The EI system is nearly 50 years old. The CPP one is 20, and the OAS system is nearly 60. The age and condition of these systems are a continual concern for ESDC. Building and maintaining enterprise IT systems is a high-risk item for governments with low public visibility. Canadians do not think about the benefits of delivery systems until they fail.
The 2010 OAG report provides a full measure of the risks that we manage every day to deliver the benefits that over nine million people depend on every day to live. As a result of a succession of budget investments, ESDC has made progress in addressing technical debt on EI, CPP and OAS, and ensuring that benefit payments continue to flow. There are considerable costs and risks in continuing to extend the life and add on to the aged systems. Some of these include upgrades to reflect new policy changes that are costly and sometimes present significant and unsolvable technological obstacles, given the state of these legacy systems.
Some of the code is in a language that's so archaic it's no longer taught in universities. Critical personnel retire, and their knowledge slowly gets lost. Decision-makers value optionality in EI of course, as governments have always sought optionality in those cases, and it allows targeting of particular groups that need help. This challenge has also led to a complex web of rules and code built out over nearly five decades, and the people who can program this custom system are becoming fewer and harder to find.
As you may recall from last year, there were many stories in the United States about many states unable to reconfigure their UI systems because they couldn't find the right personnel to do the work. The complex application and processing requirements that underpin these legacy systems lead to higher rates of error, mistakes, missed payments and fraud. They cost money and shake citizens' trust in our systems. These systems were never intended for today's needs—both the needs of public servants supporting the government and Canadian citizens alike.
Finally, applying for benefits on these old systems can be complicated and confusing. The number of unclaimed benefits is high, particularly in the pension piece, and those unpaid are almost always our country's most vulnerable, including low-income seniors, indigenous people and persons with disabilities.
Of course, we do have a plan. Our goal is to build on the EI service quality review that was done a couple of years ago, which showed that many Canadians feel they're waiting too long for the benefits they need. The panel's recommendations at the time were for improvements to the EI program, including replacing outdated technology systems. In 2020, the Government of Canada announced in its Speech from the Throne that the government will make generational investments in updating outdated IT systems to modernize the way the government serves Canadians, from the elderly to the young, from people who are looking for work to those living with a disability.
Moreover, over the coming months, the EI system will become the sole delivery mechanism for employment benefits, including for Canadians who did not qualify for EI before the pandemic. The pandemic has shown that Canada needs an EI system for the 21st century, including for the self-employed and those in the gig economy.
Replacing our legacy system is no longer an option to consider. It's critical to continue to do that in order to allow the government to continue to function. The government has some solid lessons learned in terms of what to do and not to do. On the do list is to avoid big bang approaches, which is even more important when people's pay is at risk, and to apply agile project management techniques. That means iterative incremental progressive builds as the best way to solve problems and to channel innovation.
On the don't list—it may be a bit longer—is to avoid having the government assume all of the risk in building big IT systems. The private sector spent billions producing commercial off-the-shelf systems. Governments around the world are partnering with the private sector to avoid the expense, difficulty and uncertainty of designing and implementing custom systems. Canada continues to be well-advised to do the same. We should never let planning be the enemy of doing. Big IT systems are expensive and complex, take a long time to build, and benefit from numerous checks. Traditional project management approaches may not be sufficient or adequate for today's world, and the government has adopted some internationally well-known best practices in this context.
Finally, we're introducing BDM, which is an acronym for benefits delivery modernization. It's been three years in the making. We've been doing a lot of planning, and we're poised to start implementing it in the next few months. That's our goal for sure. Working with Treasury Board and ESDC, we've designed a mission-critical transformation program to meet and succeed in delivering this historic mandate.
It's going to require tailored governance, iterative and incremental building, the best talent that the public service can bring together, as well as people from across the world who we've been recruiting to help us out.
We're going to build a BDM platform over a number of years in a series of tranches—phases, if you prefer—and frankly, we're going to start this year with putting in the foundations as soon as all the approvals have been obtained. The new BDM foundation will be very agile and provide a set of capabilities that will allow future benefits to be deployed on that platform, similar to what the private sector does.
We're procuring commercial off-the-shelf technology—that's our goal—that's already useful and also successfully used across the world in many jurisdictions, some in national government, which has been tested often and deployed on complex benefits like the ones we have.
We've put in place an “equi-system”—that's our word—a series of qualified suppliers that are going to help us, and they're all world-class organizations that are meant to come together and work in partnership with us to deliver as quickly as possible the best possible systems the government can put in place.
Finally, the BDM platform—and I'll close on this—is going to expedite the onboarding of many benefits. I think it has been the goal of many ministers and deputy ministers of our department to be able to respond much more quickly to policies, policies that governments want to introduce and generally start [Technical difficulty—Editor]. We would love to be able to do it, but it's very difficult, and frankly, our systems may not be able to support it. We would like to change that as quickly as possible.
We definitely want to personalize and tailor the system to the benefits and the needs of clients. We want digital-by-design approaches and omni-channel and multi-channel experiences where people can apply on one channel and complete an application in another, and obviously bring client experiences up to par with what people would expect from the private sector.
I'll close on this point, Mr. Chair. My two colleagues are here to not only answer questions about the current state of EI but also about what we're trying to do in the future. We look forward to your questions.
