Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, everyone, for coming here today.
I hear the folks on the other side talk about spending $830 million here or $620 million there, as if spending a lot of money quickly will solve a lot of your problems, and of course it won't. It's like government by spending announcement.
But I'm also hearing today that no system has ever crashed and caused a break in service to Canadians. No cheque for tax refunds has ever failed to go out. No pension cheque has ever been withheld due to technical failure. EI cheques are all going out and always have. System upgrades are being invested in and implemented at Citizenship and Immigration Canada. They have a new global case management system. Public Works and Government Services Canada has a record of infrastructure availability of 99.7%, which is as good as or better than anything in the private sector. Even electronic banking that lets you do your banking from your home PC goes down sometimes, and they have to do some servicing, etc.
They've invested $120 million in technology in the last three years, and investments are ongoing. About 45 million cheques for the Canada Pension Plan went out last May on a modernized system. Who would have known? The cheques just arrive in the mail.
So it's not as though the systems have failed or are held together with baling wire or are not being upgraded.
We've also heard that you can't just throw money at IT and all will be easy. It'll take time. It's a process that's been in motion. In fact, like refuelling a plane in the air, this is always going to be in motion.
It sounds to me like the people in the departments were so busy making the transitions that they took less time to actually formalize what they were doing procedure-wise, and they didn't have time...or no direction for government-wide coordination.
In that connection, Ms. Bethell, as you adopt a portfolio-wide approach to IT, is it possible to negotiate government-wide discounts on, for example, PCs, software, or mainframes?