Mr. Speaker, with regard to part (a), as a result of the strategic assessment conducted by Canada’s chief information officer, CIO, in June 2022, Employment and Social Development Canada, ESDC, reviewed the remaining approved scope of the benefits delivery modernization program, BDM, and proposed moving several planned BDM deliverables to organizations outside of BDM, such as digital identity services, social insurance register replacement and long-term cloud service procurement. Also, BDM agreed to defer some of its planned deliverables until after old age security, OAS, benefits are transferred through the workforce and workload management systems implementation. The department further assessed the impacts, risks and dependencies associated with the scope changes and developed an integrated plan for formally amending the BDM program’s scope.
With regard to part (b), BDM is a complex, large-scale, multi-year undertaking, and as expected, costs continue to be refined as scope, timing and outside factors are assessed. In 2017, $1.75 billion was the preliminary planning assumption. In 2020, $2.2 billion was the updated planning estimate. From 2021 to 2023, there was a recognition of increased costs and a need to reset the program.
The main drivers for the evolution of costs are a greater understanding of the complexity of unraveling 60-year-old systems, experience and lessons learned, increased global security threats and the impact of unanticipated global inflation. Since the November 2022 case study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, on benchmarking for cost estimation, BDM undertook an internal exercise to further refine estimates based on current plans, which have been revised as the program progresses and moves into implementation. The revised program estimate is based on the latest BDM integrated road map and accounts for known costs from the program definition, foundations phase, OAS implementation, platform maturity, employment insurance, EI, on BDM planning and implementation, Canada pension plan, CPP, on BDM, and the program management and oversight BDM project costs. Cost projections to the end of the program in 2030 have increased based on the above but have not yet been confirmed.
With regard to part (c), in the fall of 2022, the revised OAS on the BDM project plan was approved, with the migration of 600,000 foreign benefit recipients scheduled for June 2023 and the migration of all 6.9 million OAS recipients scheduled for December 2024. In March 2023, ESDC reviewed cloud security measures to better protect the new cloud platform from security issues. The first OAS release was successfully achieved on June 12, 2023, and the project remains on track for the full migration for the December 2024 date.