Thanks, Chair.
I have two areas. I don't know if I'll have enough time, but I see that we have time on the clock. I'm hoping colleagues will agree that if we have residual questions we'll use that time to do that, but I only have two right now, assuming I get satisfactory answers.
The first thing I want to do is to point out to colleagues and everyone that this Auditor General is constantly looking at individual reports and trying to extrapolate from that government-wide problems, which, if addressed on a government-wide basis, would help us to avoid these kinds of things.
I'd just like to point out that it wasn't that long ago, colleagues, that Mr. Ferguson was here telling us that in his view, what government needs to do is to “do service well”. By that, he meant to measure the impact on the citizens who are affected, and to ask whether they are getting the service and whether they are getting the value. In this case, that constituency would be the people who work here, and I just want to point out that the deputy has mentioned a couple of times that one of the things they did wrong was to measure internally how well we moved from one desk to another or from one step to another while losing sight of the holistic overview.
As we go about looking at the Auditor General's sweeping remarks about overall government, let's understand that his track record is pretty good in terms of recognizing areas that are problematic across the board. This is just a prime example of getting yourself lost in the details and forgetting what it is all about. It is all about making sure that the people who work for this government get paid in a timely fashion and in an accurate fashion, and that got lost.
Next week, when we visit the other issue that the Auditor General has raised, I would hope we keep in mind that his track record on these kinds of things is very good.
I'm just a simple guy from Hamilton, and I have trouble understanding how it is that the departments went ahead without doing the test. To me, it was like somebody putting on a major play and saying, “Meh, dress rehearsal, shmess rehearsal. We don't need to worry about that. Let's just go straight to it.” Speaking from the report, the Auditor General says:
We also found that Public Services and Procurement Canada did not test Phoenix as a whole system before implementation and did not know whether it would operate as intended....
A pilot would have allowed the Department to determine if the system would work in a real setting without affecting pay that was still being processed by the old pay system....
This pilot was the Department’s chance to test a final, live version of Phoenix before implementation.
Here's the punch line:
The pilot could have allowed the Department to detect problems that would have shown that the system was not ready.
It's just a common sense point of view, and I'll start with you, deputy. How could it be that a test to see if it works was deemed to be something superfluous and was set aside in whatever other interest, budget or otherwise? How could that final test, as one of the checks and balances, ever be just brushed away by someone making responsible decisions? How could that be, deputy?