Thank you very much.
Through you, Chair, in terms of a precedent being set.... I can agree with my colleague that there is some seriousness happening here within this Cúram software. They're trying to onboard a program that was 60 years old, for which everything was on paper.
Unfortunately, as they were taking all of this paper information from millions of seniors and onboarding it to a more digital platform, yes, there were some people who fell through the cracks: under 30,000 people of the millions who had been onboarded. Our minister has very clearly stated that, yes, we understand that there are people who fell through the cracks with this. Yes, this is why it happened. This is what happens when you deal with millions of pages of paper. This is what happens when we're onboarding millions of people at a time.
They're saying to reach out to your MP if your OAS did not come through and if the onboarding didn't happen correctly for you, or to the MP's constituency office. Reach out to the department. Reach out to the minister. That has all been very transparent.
It's not a small thing, this type of precedent, because once this precedent becomes established, it does not exist in isolation. It shapes some of the expectations that we have going forward, not just within this committee but within standing committees as a whole. It creates a model that can be replicated across those committees, across departments and across different types of files. The cumulative effect of all of this, I would say, is quite significant. It would strain public service capacity.
We always say that our public servants right now are already at capacity or are working beyond capacity. Asks such as this...they take them, crossing that organizational boundary of what their actual job description is, to suffice something that we've already clearly been transparent about in trying to fix. Sometimes when you know that things went a little bit wrong, you become transparent, you clean it up and you let people know that “this is what happened” and “this is what we're doing”.
It diverts the resources across all these six different departments. It would fundamentally alter how the departments operate: shifting focus from delivering results to managing document production. I don't feel that it is a reasonable or a responsible oversight, Mr. Chair. I also don't think it's sustainable. I don't really think that it's what Canadians expect from us.
I'd also like to address, Mr. Chair, something that's often overlooked in these types of conversations or discussions, and that's the question of whether information is already being provided. As I said before, when all of this happened, our minister had two days of technical briefings that members were allowed to go to, to discuss this and why it is happening. When we [Inaudible—Editor] a motion like this, it seems that there's also a lack of transparency. In this case, there has been no lack of transparency. That is not something that's borne out by facts. Minister Hajdu has appeared before this committee. Minister Lightbound has also appeared before this committee. Officials from both offices have also appeared through this committee. Officials have been provided, technical briefings—