Evidence of meeting #113 for Public Accounts in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cbsa.
A video is available from Parliament.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
CBSA indicated that contractors were selected because they helped produce a faster result. That's been referred to before, to speed things up and build the app faster.
Do you agree that Amazon helped to speed up the process?
If so, how?
April 9th, 2024 / 4:45 p.m.
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Cloud in general speeds up the process. For example, if you had to ensure that you had a large enough infrastructure capacity to support 30 million users on a flick of a switch, you really would not be able to do that. Most organizations, including the Government of Canada, may not have enough capacity or servers to service that spike in usage so quickly. Even at an accelerated pace of procurement you have to decide what you are going to procure, you have to order it, then it gets delivered, then you have to install it. All those things take time in a private sector context and in the public sector it may take even longer.
At the time of the pandemic there was also a limited amount of tech supplies available. It was a constrained environment. Amazon, our parent company, invented the cloud because of those challenges. As the company was trying to innovate and build things more quickly and grow, they kept running into the same kind of capacity issues over and over again. As Amazon worked to try to solve that problem for our company and our own usage, that's actually where the cloud business was born; it was that ability to allow others to scale quickly and grow quickly to reach the capacity or scale that they needed in a short amount of time.
This actually is a perfect use case for when you would want to use cloud.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Valerie Bradford Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Can you please explain to the committee about the AWS notify system?
Was this part of the ArriveCAN app?
I know you said you didn't actually develop the app, but was the notify system incorporated at all in that?
4:45 p.m.
Head of Professional Services, Canada Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Travel notification was one of the features that CBSA had designed to respond to policy. It is built on an AWS service called simple notify service. It's a cloud-native service that we provide. We assisted with configuration as it related to the security for CBSA, but it's a service that anyone can purchase commercially or privately on AWS.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
That's your time, Ms. Bradford, I'm afraid.
Beginning our third round, Mr. Genuis, you have the floor for five minutes, please.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Chair.
There's one thing that I'm quite struck by in today's hearing. We have Amazon, Microsoft and BDO here, three very large and serious companies. It's clear that you're taking this hearing seriously and that you've done a lot of detailed preparation. That's not an endorsement of everything you said necessarily, but you're clearly taking this seriously.
There is a stark contrast between your testimony and the testimony of GC Strategies and Dalian that we've heard before Parliament, two-person companies that specialize only in getting government contracts. They were completely unprepared. They were unable to answer critical questions and badly contradicted themselves, yet the government has gone to GC Strategies to do most of this project, mostly through sole-sourcing, and government officials at one point conspired with GC Strategies to get them parts of this deal. It seems like a big demonstration of problems in our procurement system that the government has repeatedly gone to GC Strategies and Dalian in spite of the obvious problems that have been well on display before committees.
I want to ask if each of you if your company would have had the capacity to build the ArriveCAN app yourself and, if you could have built all of it or at least done more of it, why didn't you? Why do you think it ended up that it was GC Strategies and Dalian instead of some of these names that Canadians would recognize?
We'll start with Microsoft on that. Be as quick as possible.
4:50 p.m.
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
Absolutely.
Microsoft is a partner-driven company. We have 16,500 partners in Canada that build atop of a platform, so our business model is to enable Canadian organizations to build this type of capability.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
But your partner companies could have built that.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Why didn't you? Why didn't you put in a proposal to the government for your partners to build the app?
4:50 p.m.
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
Our partners would lead that. We would not lead that proposal. We're 100% reliant on partners to build on those specialized solutions.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Okay, but why did none of your partners do this?
4:50 p.m.
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
I can't answer for my partners.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Managing Partner, Markets & Industry, BDO Canada
They certainly haven't seen all of the specs and requirements and stakeholders required for ArriveCAN. I can speak to the piece—
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Managing Partner, Markets & Industry, BDO Canada
It is, but I can only speak to the pieces that we have seen. I certainly would not second-guess the Auditor General and their findings in terms of what that looked like. I don't have the same level of access to those specifications.
To the question of whether we could have done that, it's speculative. I don't have access to all of the requirements that were there. I realize it's an app, but there are some complicated features, as we found in the optical reader technology—
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Did you look into building it, though?
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Why didn't you look into building it?
4:50 p.m.
Managing Partner, Markets & Industry, BDO Canada
Simply, at the time, we didn't have the capabilities when this started. We do now, but we didn't.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Director, Global Artificial Intelligence and Canada Public Policy, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
My answer is very similar to that of my Microsoft colleague.