Public Accounts Committee on April 15th, 2021

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Ms. Dancho. Your time is up.

We move on to Mr. Longfield for five minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you; and thank you in particular to Mr. Flack, Mr. Hamilton and the other witnesses who are here.

The Canadian public service really did an amazing job here. I've said in other meetings that this reminds me of Apollo 13. You had to work with some old technology as well as bring in people from retirement who had legacy data knowledge and other people who knew how to do artificial intelligence, and you put all this together to have two systems working side by side to deliver results to Canadians.

Mr. Flack, maybe you can correct me or add some detail, but I understand you ran a test on a limited number of applications to test data and performance, and then went live immediately instead of waiting two or three weeks. You then had two million transactions go through to confirm that things were working properly.

As I said, we don't have a 90-minute movie here, but could you give us a bit of a highlight as to how nimble the department was in terms of, first of all, testing and then rolling out?

Yes, I am a member of Parliament and I remember hearing that we were going to be looking at the details after the immediate crisis and that of course we would be going through the proper audits to recover any duplicate payments. That's where we're at right now.

[Graham Flack]

Thank you for the question.

To give you the sense of what we were facing, on March 13—that was the Friday before the crisis—we had a typical number of EI claims. There were about 9,000 claims that day. By Monday, the 16th, we'd hit 71,000 claims. To put that in perspective, that was almost double the record we had during the global financial crisis of 38,000 claims in a single day. By March 21, that had grown to 266,000 claims in a single day. That was 35 times our normal rate, and seven times the record we'd ever achieved.

After March 16, when we realized we had a catastrophic challenge in terms of the volume that was going to come in and our inability to process that volume on a timely basis, given the way the system is built, that's when the team built the system to allow us to move to a flat payment and automatically transfer all of those people—what became roughly two and a half million people by the end of March—from the EI system and automatically have them paid through the EI side of the CERB.

We did our first system run April 1—it may have been April 2—in the early, early morning hours. As you said, it was a few thousand. We had a confidence that we could do about half a million a day.

Minister Qualtrough gave a press conference the next day indicating she had confidence that we'd be able to do that. The system actually slightly exceeded expectations. We were processing about 600,000 a day. By the end of that first week, we'd processed most of the 2.23 million. That was just before the CERB had launched for the non-EI eligible people on the CRA side.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you for being so concise on that.

As a mechanical engineering technologist, a former machine builder, I'm very interested in the use of artificial intelligence.

We've had other audits come before us showing that data issues continue to plague some parts of the operation of the Canadian government. In this case, it seems that the data was well within 1%, and the 1% has been identified as something that can be recovered.

Is there digital government learning here that could be transferred to other departments?

[Graham Flack]

I think there is. The first thing is that if we were to have another crisis, my hope would be that at that point we wouldn't be operating on a 50-year-old technology platform that has major limitations in speed and ability. I don't want to understate the degree to which—

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Totally.

[Graham Flack]

—the human beings who held this together made the system do things it was not designed to do. Next time, I don't think that we want to rely on that level of heroism to be able to do this. We need a modern, nimble system.

To Ms. Dancho's point, I would like to have a system that would allow us to have real-time connection between the databases. That was not possible and not in place. Unfortunately, that meant we knew we were going to have a period when there was a possibility of people filing on both sides—

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Great. You're saying interconnectivity would be a future opportunity.

I'm out of time, but I want to say thank you again for incredible work with very old equipment—but that's Canadians. We get the job done.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Mr. Longfield.

We will now move to our two-and-a-half-minute round, starting with Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My questions are for Mr. Flack.

My hat goes off to you and to your entire department. We know it is not easy to manage a pandemic. I have a very simple question for you. Do you think that Service Canada employees are essential workers, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic?

[Graham Flack]

The service they provide is an essential service. That is why we changed the ways we proceed during the pandemic, while possible activities in physical locations were limited. As Ms. MacDonald could explain, we have changed the ways we do things, not only to enable traditional virtual contacts, but also to enable people with limited access to technology to make telephone calls and obtain an answer within 48 hours.

I think you are referring to the fact that we underwent a virtual transformation before returning to work, as some provinces have implemented rules, and our workspaces did not have the structure we needed to provide the services while protecting the health of our employees and of the general public. Ms. MacDonald is an expert on the matter and, if I may, I will ask her to continue.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Flack, I will expand on this before I hear from your colleague.

I want to understand something. If, as you say, Service Canada employees are essential workers, why have you closed their offices? On March 27, it was announced that Service Canada offices would close the next day. So you have implemented exceptional programs of an unprecedented nature, but you have not provided Canadians with the support they need to access them. People had to go on the Internet to access them.

Once again, I would like to inform you that not everyone has Internet access. My constituents are aging, and even people who have access to the Internet are not necessarily technologically savvy. So I'm struggling to understand your decision.

During that time, the Government of Quebec continued to support people in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its services, such as those provided to social assistance recipients, were always accessible. The decision I still don't understand today is that you reopened offices in zones that were hit even harder and were at a higher risk, instead of reopening offices in rural regions. Even today, on April 15, 18 of your Service Canada outreach sites remain closed in Quebec's rural regions.

How do you explain that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

I am very sorry; we are out of time.

Unless you can give a very short answer, we will have to move on to our next questioner.

[Lori MacDonald, Senior Associate Deputy Minister, Employment and Social Development and Chief Operating Officer for Service Canada, Department of Employment and Social Development]

Madam Chair, thank you for the question.

In context, while our offices' doors were closed, our staff were still working behind those office doors and at home. At the same time, we put an alternative service delivery method in place to reach those people who could not access our offices.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much.

We'll go on to Mr. Green.

[Michael Sabia]

Excuse me, Madam Chair—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Yes?

[Michael Sabia]

Madam Chair, it's Michael Sabia from the Department of Finance—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

I'm sorry; we really are out of time. The members are given—

[Michael Sabia]

I think your office was informed that, given the demands of the budget on Monday, I had an hour and was very happy to spend that time with you. At this point, I need to présenter mes excuses and get back to some of the budget work I've been doing. I hope you will understand. I do very much appreciate your understanding and the understanding of the committee.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sabia and Ms. Kovacevic.

We will move on to Mr. Green for two and a half minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

While I've met so many interesting people on the Hill, today is the first time that I've met a ventriloquist. Ms. Dancho was putting words in my mouth that somehow I don't care about pregnant women. In fact, I'm advocating that this benefit be provided to all people, including unemployed people. I'm disappointed that she raised the point but didn't pursue it, so I will.

Section 6.37 found that the benefit was being delivered using the “gender-based analysis plus to assess how Canadian workers were being supported by the benefit”. Would staff care to comment about how the GBA+ was applied and how the CERB helped to perhaps benefit women?

[Graham Flack]

Was that directed to the Auditor General or to the department?

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It's to the departments, probably. The gentleman from finance left, so it's to whoever's left.

[Graham Flack]

I can give a sense of it.

As to the volume of those numbers I talked about, we also had an appreciation, working with the Department of Finance and others, that they were concentrated in particular sectors, particularly retail and hospitality. Our initial assessment was that we were likely going to see a gender differentiation there because the people getting hit the hardest were in sectors where women are overrepresented.

Another factor in terms of the GBA+ analysis was where to set the $5,000-income threshold. Women are also overrepresented in the part-time worker sector, so the decision was made to go with a lower income threshold, given that part-time workers were also disproportionately—it appeared, in the early analysis—impacted by the crisis.

Over time we got better granularity on this aspect and made adjustments to the program to reflect what we were seeing. From the very early stages, we did have a sense that this risked being an unusual recession in that it was, in effect, driven by government policies that caused the closures and not by the traditional economic forces that would have, for example, hit the financial or manufacturing sector hardest first.

I would say that the sophistication of that analysis was quite limited at the front end in terms of the days we had to pull it together. Over time it became more specific.