Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I would like to tell Mr. Seeback, through you, Mr. Chair, that I'm going to be reading from notes. Those notes were prepared by me while listening to the debate—which is actually debate, not filibustering.
The motion presented by the opposition requires a technical and administrative undertaking that is functionally impossible within the mandated 30-day time frame. As a person with an electronics background married to a brilliant mathematician who is a successful IT person, and for whom IT is daily life in my house and at the family table, I argue that a request for all emails and electronic communications since January 1, 2017, across five major departments and the Prime Minister's Office, involves the retrieval and processing of massive volumes of unstructured data spanning nearly a decade.
From a technical perspective, fulfilling this would require the following.
First, for data retrieval and discovery, we'd be running keyword queries across the servers of six distinct entities to capture every communication regarding the current platform and the BDM's performance. For a project of this scale, a conservative estimate is that this could be 500,000 to one million individual records.
Second, the motion explicitly requires redactions in accordance with the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act. Based on standard industry benchmarks for legal document review—I am drawing from my general IT project management knowledge—a manual or even AI-assisted review for sensitive or personal identifiable information takes approximately two to three minutes per page.
Third, there are human-power requirements. If we process 500 pages at an average of two minutes per page, the task requires 16,666 man-hours. To complete this within a 30-day window, the government would need to immediately divert approximately 104 full-time equivalent staff to work exclusively on this project for 40 hours a week, with zero margin of error or technical delays. In the technical world, we have margins of error and delays. Please do a simple calculation. Multiply these numbers by two or three if we are talking about one million pages of documents. Please do a further calculation if we are talking about 500,000 to one million individual records, where the number of pages could definitely double or triple.
Fourth, extracting data summaries and tracking processing times, backlogs and error rates in the current platform over a nine-year period involves querying legacy databases and normalizing data from different systems' iterations. Technically, this is not a simple export function. It is a very complex data forensics and semantics task that usually requires weeks of validation to ensure the accuracy requested by the committee.
Demanding this volume of audited, redacted and synthesized technical data in 30 days ignores the reality of IT architecture and data governance protocols. It is obvious that this motion and the Conservative amendment are without thought, in terms of technicalities, and without any calculation. Ultimately, the motion by the Bloc and the amendment by the Conservatives demonstrate a profound lack of technical literacy regarding the operational life cycle of a large-scale IT infrastructure project such as the BDM.
Demanding nine years' worth of granular system logs, performance summaries and unsiloed communications across six separate government bodies in a mere 30-day window is not a legitimate exercise in transparency. It is a deliberate attempt to reduce the administrative and technical capacity of the civil service. As a technical person, I see this for what it is: an impossible set of requirements designed to force a system crash—for it will definitely force a system crash—of the departments' work for political leverage. This is a transparently dirty game of procedural sabotage intended to paralyze the government's delivery of essential benefits before committee majorities can be established.
Canadians are smarter than the opposition thinks. They see that this isn't an oversight. It is a calculated effort to break the system from within, while ignoring every fundamental principle of data governance and system architecture.
Those are a few of my calculations and a few of my words to be considered. It is technically very difficult. It's impossible to do it within a 30-day time frame. Looking at all these documents is a risk for our system, so I would ask the opposition, both parties, to look at those words that they put outside.
Thank you.