Chair, I don't think our report says “spend, spend, spend”. What our report does say is that aging IT—I'll come back to what we mean by aging IT—is a significant risk for the government. There needs to be a good assessment of what that risk is, and then there has to be a plan to deal with it.
We have seen, in the five departments we looked at, that there were three who had prepared longer-term plans and who had indicated that they had done the assessment of the funds they required. And the shortfall from their current funding levels is $2 billion. So to me, this is a significant issue. There are significant investments.
Now let me come back to what we mean by aging IT. It doesn't simply mean that a system is 30 years old. A system could in fact be that age and still be working efficiently and still continue on. But we note in the report that there are systems in the government in a language that is no longer taught in schools. And people are retiring, so there is a question of human resources and who is actually going to be able to modify these programs if modifications are needed.
There are issues with the infrastructure. We have a case of a data centre where the HVAC heating and ventilation system is no longer supported by the manufacturer. So if the air conditioning breaks down, those computers can't work.
At CRA, one of the major data centres is 40 years old and was never designed to be a data centre.
So there are major issues throughout government. What we are calling for is to have a good profile, good information about what these expenditures are going to be, recognizing that changing some of these systems is not a question of a few months or even a year. It can take many years, and if they all come in at once and they all need money, there will never be enough money to do it. So it's a matter of planning out how this is going to happen, making sure there is some coordinated approach to this, making sure as well—and the secretary talked about the administrative services review—that there is a thought given to how these services can be delivered in a different way. Some of the systems we have here are no longer....
I mean, we often talk about getting more efficiencies from government, and there probably are ways to make these programs more efficient, but it will require an investment in technology and a different way of doing things. Many of the programs have a lot of steps and a lot of complexity to them. To make it simpler to manage, you are going to have to change the way the systems work, and that is going to involve a lot of money.